AquaLab

Project Name:

AquaLab - Maritime & Intelligence Defence

Repository:

AquaLab-Eudis-Defence (GitHub)

Team:

• Guilherme Cruz (Team Lead)

• Gonçalo Ferreira

• Dinis Roxo

Team motivation

We are a team strongly committed to sustainability, with experience in robotics and aquatic monitoring. We believe that autonomous technology can protect both the environment and critical infrastructure, which is why we adapted AquaLab to support coastal surveillance missions and multimodal defense operations.

Short description

AquaLab is an autonomous aquatic drone that collects and analyzes water data to detect objects, threats, and anomalies in real time. It features a modular design, a low profile, and a cost significantly lower than existing solutions.

Long description

AquaLab is an autonomous aquatic drone designed to address a critical gap in European maritime defense: the lack of intelligent surveillance directly at the water level. While satellites and aerial drones fall short in coastal areas, low altitudes, or underwater environments, AquaLab operates discreetly on the surface, providing real-time detection, tracking, and analysis — even under electronic warfare (EW) conditions.

The platform collects and interprets data such as salinity, temperature, turbidity, conductivity, and pH (among others), variables that directly affect sonar performance and enable the detection of dead zones and the anticipation of hostile movements. With onboard AI and fully autonomous operation, AquaLab does not rely on a continuous network connection, drastically reducing operational vulnerability.

Thanks to its modular architecture, it can also act as a mini aircraft carrier for aerial drones, expanding missions to include aerial reconnaissance, anti-drone countermeasures, or collaborative coastal intelligence. All of this comes at a fraction of the cost, with rapid deployment and a native dual-use design, applicable both to coastal defense and maritime infrastructure protection, as well as to strategic environmental monitoring in peacetime.

Justificação da pertinência

Europe still lacks effective surveillance capabilities at water level, where today the most difficult-to-detect operations take place, including naval drones, smuggling, sabotage, and stealth reconnaissance.

The war in Ukraine has proven that maritime warfare has already shifted toward autonomous platforms that are invisible to traditional systems. However, most current solutions rely solely on satellites and aerial drones, leaving critical blind spots near the coast, at low altitudes, and below the surface.

AquaLab was created precisely to fill this gap, offering autonomous detection, low signature, resistance to electronic warfare, and modular expansion capabilities. It is ready for coastal defense, rapid response, and integration with allied forces, all with a cost and deployment speed that are incomparably better than existing solutions.

Problema que resolvemos

Currently, there is no truly effective surveillance directly at the water level, where the most difficult-to-detect maritime threats occur, such as stealth naval drones, underwater sabotage operations, silent smuggling, and clandestine movements near the coast.

Most operational systems rely exclusively on satellites, coastal radars, or aerial drones, all of which face critical limitations at low altitudes, in complex coastal environments, and below the surface.

At the same time, there is no continuous and intelligent collection of essential aquatic data such as salinity, temperature, turbidity, and conductivity, key variables for detecting anomalies, anticipating risk patterns, and optimizing sonar performance by reducing dead zones and detection failures.

Without access to this layer of data, the one closest to the actual threat, current systems operate with incomplete visibility, delaying response times and compromising security in strategic areas such as the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea.

Solução Proposta

AquaLab is an autonomous aquatic drone that operates directly on the sea surface, collecting real-time aquatic and underwater data such as salinity, temperature, turbidity, and conductivity. This enables the detection of anomalous changes and the optimization of detection systems like sonars, reducing dead zones.

In addition, it processes information locally using AI, enabling detection, tracking, and immediate alerts — even in environments with interference or electronic warfare (EW).

Objetivos do Hackathon

During the hackathon, our focus will be on building the first functional physical prototype of the aquatic drone, developing the entire structure from scratch, including design, cutting, assembly, and full mechanical integration.

In parallel, we will work on the electronic and sensor systems, including soldering, assembly, and calibration of sensors, as well as programming the microcontrollers (e.g., Arduino) for real-time data collection.

On the software layer, we will develop the communication infrastructure via API to connect the drone with the web platform and build the web interface for intelligent visualization and analysis, with automatic AI-assisted report generation.

Finally, we will train and integrate a computer vision model for aerial drone detection and tracking, optimizing it during the hackathon to accurately recognize potential threats.