Vehicles

Thales Group: Benefits of taking part in Unmanned Warrior
Thales Group played a key role in the U.K. Royal Navy’s
Unmanned Warrior exercise held in the fall of 2016. Thales
demonstrated its capability through the Watchkeeper Unmanned
Aircraft System, the Halcyon Unmanned Surface
Vehicle and its collaborative work in the field of unmanned
command and control research. Watchkeeper, currently in
service with the British Army, flew for the first time in a
littoral naval environment operating alongside a Type 23
warship and a merchant vessel and was integrated into a
series of exercises varying from persistent wide-area surveillance
support up to 150 km offshore to landing forces
and naval gunfire support. Data collected by Watchkeeper
were streamed down remotely to the vessels and analyzed
by operators to make better-informed command decisions
in support of the trials.
Also participating was Thales’s Halcyon Unmanned Surface
Vehicle (USV) equipped with a Thales Towed Synthetic
Aperture Sonar. The USV took part in a number of
minehunting challenges aimed at demonstrating the significant
benefits of autonomous technology when operating in
hostile environments, including the reduction of risk to life.
Missions using Halcyon were planned and coordinated using
Thales mission management software, providing comprehensive
command and control of the USV operation.
Thales is a key sensor provider to the Royal Navy’s existing
minehunting fleet through the operationally proven
Sonar 2093 and Sonar 2193.
Thales is also involved, with industry partners, in the
U.K.’s Defense Science Technology Laboratory (DSTL)
innovative research program MAPLE (Maritime Autonomous
Platform Exploitation), which is developing the future
architecture for Unmanned Systems Command and
Control by enabling multiple unmanned platforms, such as
unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), unmanned surface vehicles
(USVs) and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), and
their payloads, to be commanded and controlled from a
single control station. The company has been instrumental
in the design of this multi-domain architecture and has
brought experience of operating unmanned vehicles into
this design activity.
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Marine Technology Reporter 21