Off to the races

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.

Aboard the NRP Escorpião exercises E2 (Water column survey with 2 AUVs) and E6 (Multivehicle network control) began their first runs. This enabled the team to iron-out some small bugs but also see how the objectives would fair outside the APDL pre-REP testing area.

At the BNL the team concentrated on the UAV operation side working on exercises E9 (Wavy drops with Mariner), E10 (Collection of water samples) and E13 (Autonomous VTOLairplane Mission). These were met with a mix-bag of results having the Mariner presented a never before seen behavior when attempting to drop the Wavys into the water. This issue occupied the UAV team for the remainder of the day putting a small dent on the E10 planning timeline but nothing that can't be handled.

The day ended with a well deserved rest after getting things ready for the next day's campaign.