In their second year, engineering students who have chosen an advanced mechanical engineering course work together on a mechanical design project. This year, Thales submitted a project on drones in mine warfare to the 99 engineering students.
Projects are at the heart of the engineering students’ training. They enable students to develop their professional skills by acquiring and applying working methods and technical knowledge, but also to become more independent and learn to work as part of a team.
“When putting the teams together, we tried to mix the students up as much as possible in order to create an environment that reflects the diversity of teams found in the workplace,” explains Jean-François Guillemette, mechanical design teacher and project coordinator.
With the aim of modernising its mine warfare solutions, Thales has developed a new USV (unmanned surface vessel, colloquially known as a sea drone) concept. It is equipped with a towed sonar that is deployed in the water and retrieved autonomously and remotely from an operations centre. Combining the USV with the towed sonar, the company has developed a LARS system to deploy and retrieve the sonar.
And the operational objective of this system? To scan the seabed to monitor and search for mines to be neutralised.
As part of this mechanical design project, the company asked ENSTA Bretagne students to develop a new LARS system that could be installed on different platforms. The system must be able to:
- Provide at least the same functional and environmental performance as the system already in use
- Be integrated on as many USVs as possible, while requiring little modification from one platform to another.
The students will work on this project for three months in teams of 3 or 4, and each team will be required to develop, design and propose the most appropriate solution to the Thales teams. By the end of the project, a total of 26 concepts will have been developed by the entire class, hopefully enabling Thales to identify an innovative LARS architecture that best meets its needs.
*LARS (LAunch & Recovery System) is a system for deploying and retrieving sea drones or other vessels from a naval platform.
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