REGENT Craft completes Squire demonstration at Silent Swarm

REGENT Craft's Squire wing-in-ground effect unmanned aerial vehicle in flight during a demonstration in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. (REGENT Craft)

REGENT (Regional Electric Ground Effect Nautical Transport) Craft announced the completion of the first freshwater tests of its Squire autonomous seaglider drone at the Silent Swarm military experimentation event in August 2026.

Becky Russo, Director of Defense Mission Integration at REGENT Craft, told Janes on 25 August, that prior to Silent Swarm, previous testing had been conducted in saltwater environments near the company's headquarters in Rhode Island.

REGENT previously announced that it had completed the first ground-effect flight of its Squire seaglider drone in April 2026.

The Silent Swarm event provided “the opportunity to conduct several multi-domain field experiments, run risk-reduction simulations with a government modeling and simulation team, obtain real-time feedback from uniformed operators and engineers in relevant fields, and receive a final written report after the event that includes documented feedback from assessors, spectrum managers, and the modeling and simulation team”, according to a DoD special notice.

It was organized as a multi-domain environment—composed of land, air, sea, undersea, cyber, and space—by the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division (NSWC Crane), in support of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering [OUSD(R&E)].

Russo said the testing demonstrated the effects of freshwater on Squire, from variations in launch height to wave tolerances, as Squire operated in the less dense freshwater environment.

Russo said Silent Swarm allowed the REGENT team to test Squire's versatility, collaborating with industry partners to mount equipment like sensors internally and externally to the seacraft.