January 30th, 2018


BARRACUDA, together with INTRACOM DEFENSE, ALTUS and the University of Athens, Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, participates in OCEAN 2020, the most important project related to the first European Defense Fund’s initiative to boost Europe’s defense capabilities. The project was issued by the European Union under the “Preparatory Action on Defense Research” and was selected for funding through a competitive procedure that was conducted by the European Defense Agency.

The OCEAN 2020 team, which is led by the Italian company Leonardo, comprises of 42 partners from 15 European countries, including the Ministries of Defense of Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Lithuania, with additional support from the Ministries of Defense of Sweden, France, The United Kingdom, Estonia and the Netherlands.

OCEAN 2020 is the first example of a cross-European military research program under the Preparatory Action initiative. It will integrate unmanned platforms of different type (fixed wing, rotary wing, surface and underwater) with naval units’ command and control centers, allowing data exchange via satellite with command and control centers on land. It will involve two live demonstrations of maritime surveillance and interdiction operations in the Mediterranean and Baltic Sea, conducted by European fleets using unmanned aircraft, surface vessels and underwater systems.

The goal of all Greek partners is to contribute successfully to the OCEAN 2020 project, where, BARRACUDA will provide to the consortium an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) to be used in the maritime surveillance and interdiction operations in the Mediterranean Sea, INTRACOM DEFENSE will be responsible for different tasks related to the requirements analysis of the USVs, to the communication architectures and technologies that will be used in the consortium and to the security of communications (COMSEC) and information (INFOSEC), ALTUS is going to participate in tasks related to operational scenario modelling and simulation and to training needs analysis and design and finally the University of Athens, Department of Informatics and Telecommunications will participate in tasks related to deployment modelling of unmanned platforms.