What is the UDT Europe 2027 Agenda?

The UDT Europe 2027 Preliminary Agenda provides an initial overview of not only the technical sessions but also the challenge and operator-led discussions which will take place in Glasgow, focusing on the evolving requirements and innovations shaping the undersea defence environment.

Key themes included advancements in platform design, underwater communications, autonomous and uncrewed systems, human factors, sensor integration, and operational resilience in contested maritime domains to acheive excellence in a hybrid age.

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UDT Conference Programme for 2026

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  1. Keynote Theatre
    Keynote
     
  1. Theatre 2
    Powering Persistent Seabed Surveillance: Evaluating Americium‑241 for Decades‑Long Autonomous Undersea Sensor Networks
    • Sensors, Weapons and Countermeasures
    Persistent underwater sensing is becoming increasingly important to the protection of critical subsea infrastructure, maritime domain awareness, anti-submarine warfare, and the monitoring of increasin … Read More
    Speakers
    Jack Lines
    Theatre 3
    Seeing Is Believing: Perception-Driven Adaptive Underwater Autonomy
    • Platforms and Autonomous vehicles
    Blindly following a given order has long been the life of a subsea robot. Today, underwater autonomy often means providing a vehicle with a set of trajectories or waypoints and asking it to follow the … Read More
    Speakers
    Jonatan Scharff Willners
    Theatre 1
    Mines don’t move, until they do: multi-pass change detection in SAS surveys
    • Operational Effectiveness
    Mine warfare is inherently persistent: a threat area is surveyed repeatedly across weeks, seasons, and exercises. Yet most mine-countermeasures (MCM) automatic target recognition (ATR) pipelines still … Read More
    Speakers
    Ebru Koçdor
    1. Theatre 2
      From Endurance to Persistence: A Scalable Energy Architecture for Resident Undersea Systems
      • Platforms and Autonomous vehicles
      Persistent undersea operations are becoming increasingly important for maritime situational awareness, critical undersea infrastructure protection and operations in remote or contested environments. H … Read More
      Speakers
      Richard Knox
      Theatre 1
      What if we stopped designing mine neutralisers to survive?
      • Operational Effectiveness
      Reusable underwater vehicles are designed around the assumption that the vehicle must survive its mission. An expendable mine neutraliser has the opposite lifecycle: every successful mission ends with … Read More
      Speakers
      Justin Sykes
      Keynote Theatre
      From Frigates to Autonomous Vehicles: Re-imagining Sonar for the Hybrid Naval Fleet
      • Sensors, Weapons and Countermeasures
      The rapid emergence of hybrid naval fleets, comprising traditional warships, uncrewed surface vessels, autonomous underwater vehicles and distributed sensing assets, is challenging many of the assumpt … Read More
      Speakers
      Chris Tucker
      Theatre 3
      Silent Navigation and Beyond: Magnetic Sensing for Underwater Vehicles
      • Platforms and Autonomous vehicles
      Underwater vehicles require navigation capabilities that allow the vehicles to remain undetected while bounding inertial navigation drift. To bound this drift, many underwater vehicles rely on Doppler … Read More
      Speakers
      Martin Petré MSc
      1. Theatre 2
        Advancing Submarine Specific Energy Storage Solutions
        • Platforms and Autonomous vehicles
        Advanced battery technologies are increasingly critical to the performance, endurance, and operational flexibility of modern submarines. Growing electrical loads driven by combat systems, cooling and … Read More
        Speakers
        Catriona Gilmour
        Theatre 3
        Impact of The Hybrid Navy on Maritime Autonomy
        • Multi-disciplinary solutions
        The Hybrid Navy concept marks a paradigm shift in maritime warfare, fundamentally reshaping the design, development, and deployment of autonomy in the maritime domain. This paper explores its transfor … Read More
        Speakers
        Andy Holmes
        Theatre 1
        Detect, identify, neutralise: portable ROVs as a rapid-response layer for hybrid fleets
        • Platforms and Autonomous vehicles
        Reason for writing Hybrid fleets are changing how navies plan undersea operations, yet much of the discussion centres on large uncrewed platforms that take years to procure, integrate, and certify. Ma … Read More
        Speakers
        Eric Starkweather
        Keynote Theatre
        Detecting and Tracking the Unseen
        • Sensors, Weapons and Countermeasures
        As underwater targets of interest become increasingly quiet, legacy passive sonar processing chains are finding it increasingly difficult to detect those targets at long range. We have developed a nov … Read More
        Speakers
        Simon Maskell
        9:00am
      2. 11:00am
      3. 12:00pm
      4. 1:00pm
      5. 2:00pm
      6. 3:00pm
      1. Theatre 2
        Developing innovative solutions for ASW USV propulsion systems
        • Platforms and Autonomous vehicles
        North Atlantic Navies are currently facing multiple pressures, both at the operational and at the societal level. Without question, in any future conflict, control of the underwater battlespace must b … Read More
        Speakers
        Benjamin Salter CEng FIET
        Keynote Theatre
        Acoustic detection, classification, localisation, and tracking of UUVs using a sensor network: Results from a real-world trial
        • Sensors, Weapons and Countermeasures
        Advances in uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) have been driving hybrid underwater warfare. UUVs are attractive platforms for underwater reconnaissance and sabotage, posing emerging threats to critic … Read More
        Speakers
        Salil Luesutthiviboon
        Theatre 3
        Hybrid Navies - How Far Could the Underwater Battlespace Change?
        • Multi-disciplinary solutions
        Advocates of new technologies often claim game-changing gains in performance leading directly to operational advantage. These are usually allied with assumptions as to how opponents will respond along … Read More
        Speakers
        Andrew Munday
        Theatre 1
        Small boat, big picture: multi-modal sensing for persistent maritime situational awareness
        • Platforms and Autonomous vehicles
        Grey-zone activity against critical undersea infrastructure, dark shipping, and the sheer scale of the North Atlantic and Baltic approaches have exposed a gap between exquisite crewed ISR platforms an … Read More
        Speakers
        Guy Looker
        9:00am
      2. 11:00am
      3. 12:00pm
      4. 1:00pm
      5. 2:00pm
      6. 3:00pm
      1. Theatre 3
        Designing the Undersea Hybrid Navy: ConOps to Concept
        • Platforms and Autonomous vehicles
        The development of unmanned systems has marched relentlessly onwards and is now forcing all navies to re-examine their current force structures. Across the world, navies are racing to identify the thr … Read More
        Speakers
        Alex Walchester CEng MEng MRINA
        Theatre 1
        Stay-on-Mission: Dual-Purpose Autonomous IMR and Security Patrol of Critical Undersea Infrastructure
        • Platforms and Autonomous vehicles
        Critical subsea infrastructure extends for thousands of kilometres. Regular inspections are needed to understand asset condition, while the same pipelines, power cables and telecommunications cables i … Read More
        Speakers
        Brendan Hyland
        Theatre 2
        The Silent Revolution: Magnetically Geared Propulsion for XV Excalibur
        • Platforms and Autonomous vehicles
        This paper presents the design, integration and testing of a novel magnetically geared propulsion motor developed for XV Excalibur (XCAL), the Royal Navy’s largest autonomous extra-large uncrewed unde … Read More
        Speakers
        David Powell MIET
        Keynote Theatre
        Quiet Contacts in a Congested Domain: Cooperative Edge Intelligence Across Towed Arrays and Sonobuoy Fields
        • Sensors, Weapons and Countermeasures
        The undersea domain is increasingly congested, populated by quieter, smaller contacts that single-platform sensing cannot reliably prosecute. This paper studies one specific heterogeneous ensemble, as … Read More
        Speakers
        Robert O'Brien
        9:00am
      2. 11:00am
      3. 12:00pm
      4. 1:00pm
      5. 2:00pm
      6. 3:00pm
      1. Keynote Theatre
        MASS, SCALE, LOW COST will it achieve the right ASW Effect?
         
      2. Theatre 3
        Hybrid Navy
         
      3. Theatre 2
        PESCOFID consortium, 5 months on from OPEX
         
      4. Theatre 1
        Finland – “superpower” of Naval mine warfare
         
      1. Theatre 2
        Maximising operational capability through the use of better materials; exploring the use of titanium in naval applications
        • Innovation, Production and Investment
        Speaker Details:Ian Duncan is a Principal Naval Engineer at BMT. A former submariner, Ian served in Vanguard Class submarines and was the Programme Manager for the NATO Submarine Rescue System. In his … Read More
        Speakers
        Ian Duncan CEng
        Theatre 3
        Control, Not (just) Detection: Measuring Operational Effectiveness in Critical Underwater Infrastructure Protection
        • Operational Effectiveness
        Critical Underwater Infrastructure (CUI) is increasingly exposed to physical disruption, cyber compromise, hybrid activity and complex supply-chain dependencies. Current approaches to seabed security … Read More
        Speakers
        Ioannis Papadopoulos
        Theatre 1
        Beyond Acoustic and Optical: Plasmonic Communications for the Undersea Battlespace
        • Operational Effectiveness
        For decades, undersea communications have been constrained by a difficult set of physical tradeoffs. RF systems are severely limited by seawater, while acoustic communications can impose constraints i … Read More
        Speakers
        Sanjee Singla
        Keynote Theatre
        Technology Doesn't Create Readiness: Scaling Subsea and Maritime Capability for Defence
        • Platforms and Autonomous vehicles
        Reason National and international initiatives are accelerating the transition of advanced maritime technologies from research and development into operational use. The UK Defence Industrial Strategy, … Read More
        Speakers
        Alan Anderson
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