The world's largest naval robotics exercise is running off Setúbal until 25 September
REPMUS 2026 has brought 36 navies, 1,500 people, 14 ships and more than 300 unmanned maritime systems to Tróia and Sesimbra, across 1,370 square kilometres of water.
The 16th edition of REPMUS started on Monday at Tróia and Sesimbra, and the scale still takes a moment to absorb. More than 300 unmanned maritime systems, 14 ships supporting them, and 1,500 people from 36 navies. It runs until 25 September.
The Portuguese Navy has hosted it since 2010 and calls it, without much modesty, the largest robotics and unmanned-vehicle experimentation exercise in the world. The name is entirely literal: Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping with Maritime Unmanned Systems.
The footprint
Operations are run from the Navy’s Operational Experimentation Centre at Tróia. From there the trials spread across Portuguese exercise areas and the Infante D. Henrique Free Technological Zone, covering more than 400 square nautical miles — 1,370 square kilometres of sea and coastline.
And it is not only what floats. The Navy’s own briefing sets out that the systems under test operate on the surface, below it, in the air and on land, and that the exercise is co-organised with the University of Porto’s engineering faculty, the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation, NATO’s maritime unmanned systems capability group and the European Defence Agency.
Why Portuguese industry turns up
More than 60 research and development companies are taking part, alongside 13 universities and five NATO bodies. If you build drones or autonomous boats, four weeks demonstrating your kit to 36 navies at once is a sales channel that exists nowhere else in Europe, which is why the Portuguese defence sector shows up in numbers — startups and established firms alike.
It is the same trajectory visible elsewhere: Tekever supplying surveillance drones to the British Army and the Super Tucano assembly line in Beja declared of national interest. Portugal does not build frigates, but it has been quietly building a position in software, autonomy and sensors.
Running alongside REPMUS is Dynamic Messenger, NATO’s exercise for turning these experiments into operational concepts. That is the gap between a prototype that works on a beach at Tróia and a system a navy is willing to take to sea.
By Oliver Grant
Photo: Jhon Parsons / U.S. Navy (public domain)
