From the call for tenders to the project, from the project to the tests, to make the technologies requested and developed through the calls for research promoted by the National Pole of the Underwater Dimension real and usable quickly and thus give impetus and concreteness to innovation and technological sovereignty in our country. LastWednesday 1 July, the PNS, recognized as unique notonly on the national scene, as part of the Underwater Operations Seminar 2026 – Enhancing NATO Cooperation in Underwater Capabilities, crossed an important milestone: the live demo of TARAS took place at the San Bartolomeo site, where its Operational Structure is located in its “CORE” version, i.e. the first operational demonstration of the TARAS project, as well as the first ever of one of the PNS calls.
The TARAS project, an acronym that stands for “Advanced Network Technologies for Autonomous Submarine Vehicles”, born as part of the first batch of calls for tenders of the Hub, involves the design and development of a hybrid and secure and scalable underwater network infrastructure that connects sensors, autonomous vehicles and control centers for communications, security and monitoring of critical infrastructures and collection data using wired and wireless networks.
A project designed to “give voice to the sea” with dual use purposes, both defense and surveillance – it will serve to foil any intrusions into the monitored marine area and therefore will be applied in a particular way for port security – both for civil applications such as seabed mapping, environmental monitoring or wreck search.
Wednesday’s demonstration, which lasted about 2 hours and saw the full success of the operations, represents an important milestone that marks, in the operational and technological path, a before and after. With the demo on July 1st, in fact, the validity of the project relating to an underwater wireless network infrastructure that has the possibility of interconnecting with the various assets that are underwater and on the surface in order to create a system that allows monitoring and surveillance of an underwater infrastructure was demonstrated. The implementation of TARAS is based, in fact, on the integration of underwater wireless network nodes , underwater unmanned vehicles (UUVs), sensors on marine platforms and fiber optic cables, with the aim of transmitting data between the marine and terrestrial environments in an adaptive, safe and fast way. The level of technological readiness has not yet reached the expected TRL, but the demo has made it possible to validate the effectiveness of the project approach and to highlight a high degree of integration and operational cooperation between the partners, in line with the expected time schedule.The demo of TARAS CORE was coordinated by WSense S.r.l., leader of the TARAS project, Leonardo S.p.A., Fincantieri S.p.A., Saipem S.p.A. and Graal TechS.r.l.
Telecom Italia Sparkle S.p.A. and a network of innovative SMEs such as MDM Team S.r.l., Sitep Italia S.p.A., Aalea S.r.l., Next Ingegneria dei Sistemi S.p.A., FlySight S.r.l. and Tecnav Systems S.r.l., as well as the expertise of the University of Genoa, Sapienza University of Rome and Polytechnic University of Marche, are also working on the development of the TARAS project.
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