The explosion was so sudden and intense that it startled everyone present, leaving them silent as they tried to understand what had just happened. They had seen the drone take off, fly several dozen meters, and hover over a nearby sandy beach, but they had no time to realise that the small object it had just dropped was a test payload for a demonstration. Now, only the soot stain on the beach remained as evidence of the explosion, while the drone returned to its base, landing smoothly in the same spot from which it had taken off.
This event was part of multiple demonstrations of defence prototypes held at the Portuguese Navy Operational Experimentation Centre in Tróia on 16 April, coinciding with a visit from the Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro. Instituto Superior Técnico participated in the event alongside several of its research centres and students’ organisations. Among the showcased devices were drones capable of autonomous take-off, flight, and landing, as well as autonomous marine vehicles that could survey the seabed, and various ships and submarines. Researchers from the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR-Lisboa), the Centro de Ciências e Tecnologias Nucleares (C2TN), and students from the Técnico Solar Boat (TSB) and the Aerospace Engineering Students’ Organization (AeroTéc) contributed to the presentations.
Over the past two years, ‘Técnico has focused strategically on research and development in the defence sector’, shares Rogério Colaço, the president of Técnico, as those present awaited the arrival of the Prime Minister, who would dock at the military base a few minutes later. ‘Técnico has become a very important partner for the Armed Forces and Military Academies in efforts to develop our country’s defence technology’.
Técnico students, researchers, and professors brought a variety of prototypes to Tróia on that rainy afternoon. The SP-01, developed by Técnico Solar Boat, is an autonomous marine vehicle equipped with a battery and solar panels. First-year Master’s student André Carvalho recalled that during tests conducted at the same Tróia base in 2024, the boat successfully retrieved a colleague during a simulated search-and-rescue mission following a shipwreck.
Luís Sebastião, a researcher at ISR-Lisboa, described two maritime vehicles he would present to Luís Montenegro. One of these vehicles can reach depths of 1,000 meters and is designed to monitor the levels of radioactivity in the sea. “It’s something that is poorly understood, very little is known yet and there are few tools available for mapping it”, he explained, adding an interesting detail – the vehicle is part of the Radioactivity Monitoring in Ocean Ecosystems project, resulting in the acronym RAMONES, named after the famous band since the principal investigator is a fan.
The “dress rehearsal” continued before the Prime Minister’s arrival. António Gonçalves, a professor and researcher at C2TN, presented a result from the FRIENDS project—a collaboration between C2TN, the Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion (IPFN), and the Portuguese Air Force Academy. This project involves a radiation detector integrated into a drone, which can remotely identify radioactive material in containers at ports, for example. This equipment, developed with the help of master’s and doctoral students, also incorporates artificial intelligence algorithms to enable autonomous site mapping, ensuring the safety of operators involved.
The Prime Minister praised the work of all the teams involved. One of the most memorable moments occurred when a student from AeroTéc, while presenting the Baltasar rocket, invited Luís Montenegro to sign the device, just centimetres away from a signature by the President of the Portuguese Republic, Marcelo de Rebelo de Sousa, on another occasion. AeroTéc also showcased a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle that can be used to monitor forests for fire detection and assist in emergency rescues.
‘For the students’ organisations, the collaboration we have here in Tróia, at CEOM, has opened up numerous opportunities for testing equipment’, explained Rogério Colaço, recalling that this is a Technology Free Zone, ‘where students have access to testing and experimental resources that are hard to find elsewhere.’
