Demonstration day

REP16 - Demonstration day
As in previous years, LSTS and the Portuguese Navy are once again co-organizing REP16 exercise. This year, among the participants are CMRE, the Belgian Navy, SPAWAR and Oceanscan-OMT. Observing this exercise will be members from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, NASA and JPI Oceans.

Broadening the Scope

Noptilus-3 and Caravela heading out of Sesimbra harbor

With the 3rd day of REP the stage was set for a more ambitious exercise bringing into the fold AUVs, UAVs and ASVs. The E5 (ASV + UAV has communication relays for AUV) exercise began its first trials on open waters on the outside of Sesimbra harbor. A large fraction of the operational team was allocated to this effort since it required 3 operation locations.

With ups and downs

José Pinto getting ready to launch Nop-1 for multi-hop acoustic tests

As the REP continues so do the operations with different vehicles and at different locations.

As planned the LSTS team boarded NRP Escorpião in order to tackle both E3 (Control and monitoring through multi-hop acoustic network) and E4 (Adaptive multibeam survey). At the helm of the operations were José Pinto and Paulo Dias and after a full day's operations initial results were encouraging. Previously undetected bugs were diagnosed and corrected with ease allowing testing to continue as expected.

Off to the races

João Teixeira return to NRP Escorpião after recovering Xplore-1 from a successful launch
And so it begins, another edition of the REP exercise. This year back to the mainland and with great expectations for all the planned exercises and interactions. The work actually began the day before with the whole team arriving at Sesimbra to unload the majority of the material and vehicles in order to setup the first day's missions. We were greeted, as in previous years, with great warmth by the guys from DMS3 who helped us with the unloading. Fast-forwarding to the first operations day the team was split up among 2 operation areas: NRP Escorpião and BNL.