A consortium led by Naval Group Belgium, a 100 per cent subsidiary of French shipbuilder the Naval Group, has been selected by the European Commission to work on the European Extended Mine Countermeasures (E=MCM) project to expand the mine countermeasures (MCM) capabilities of EU naval operators. The project aims to design, prototype, and demonstrate a single system-of-systems architecture with scalable unmanned autonomous systems as well as intelligent platforms and decision-support tools for MCM to address the threats of drifting, tethered, and buried mines.
E=MCM's objective is to deliver new MCM capabilities prototypes ready for industrialisation in the EU. This comes in the wake of the recently concluded Mine Risk Clearance for Europe (MIRICLE) project, a 24-month collaborative endeavour carried out by a European consortium led by Naval Group Belgium and sponsored by both the European Commission and the ministries of defence of the participating countries.
The consortium led by Naval Group Belgium is composed of 21 partners from 11 European nations. Among the partners are French maritime robotics company Exail, defence technology specialist Thales, Swedish naval shipbuilder Saab Kockums, Spanish shipbuilder Navantia, Lithuania's Baltic Institute of Advanced Technology, the Flanders Marine Institute of Belgium, and Dutch engineering firm Royal IHC.