Sener Aerospace & Defence and VRC EU lead COMMANDS

Convoy Operations with Manned-unManneD Systems” (COMMANDS), a European Defence Fund 2021 project, aims to provide a solution to face most of the challenges in the use of unmanned ground systems (UGS) in combination (swarming) with manned military vehicles and air systems.

COMMANDS is under the umbrella of a System of Systems able to provide an intelligent and effective cooperation of the different assets, identifying the technological gaps to be covered in order to strengthen the European military operations supported by unmanned or remotely piloted vehicles, under the European independent strategy principle.

The results will not only enable to upgrade current ground vehicles of the EU inventory for specific missions, but also to be integrated in future vehicles in development.

A multidisciplinary team, led by Sener Aerospace & Defence, will cover the different aspects of the activity, incorporating 21 Consortium Partners from 10 member States that provide a multidisciplinary and complementary approach (OEMs, midcaps, specialised SMEs, renowned universities and both public and private research centres and laboratories to answer the needs of the European Commission and the Member States, strenghtening the European Defence Industry and Technological Base.

The proposal is developed in the context of PESCO project iUGS, and is strongly aligned with the Ground Combat Capabilities of EU Capability Development Priorities (CDP), addressing modular, open and scalable architecture for manned and unmanned joint capabilities, developed in cooperation.

The European Commission awarded €24.8 million funding to the COMMANDS project led by Sener Sener Aerospace & Defence and Vetronics Research Centre (VRC) EU. It will have a total cost of €26.8 million during a three-year execution, and counts with the support of seven Ministries of Defence that as end-users have provided common requirements for the project.

The “COMMANDS” European Defence Fund 2021 project was officially launched at a Kick-Off-Meeting chaired by the European Commission DG DEFIS at Sener Aerospace & Defence Brussels office last December 2022.