REPMUS 2026: Oshen demonstrates USV acoustic picket line and ship deployment

Oshen C-Star USV at Exercise REPMUS 26 (Oshen)

UK company Oshen has demonstrated an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) ‘acoustic picket line' at NATO Exercise ‘REPMUS 26' (Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping with Maritime Unmanned Systems) in Tróia, Portugal. The company also demonstrated the deployment of its C-Star USV from a warship at the exercise.

During REPMUS 26 Oshen deployed C-Star USVs equipped with hydrophones to create a distributed surveillance network that was tested for the first time against live targets. Oshen said that its approach is to utilise many small and low-cost sensors over a wide area to increase the likelihood of detections. C-Stars could be used to identify the location of a target and could then assist in vectoring other assets such as those with towed-array sonars to that area. What the company calls a “constellation” of thousands of C-Stars could hold position in a picket line across stretches of water such as the Greenland, Iceland, UK (GIUK) gap, the company said.

Speaking to media at REPMUS on 21 September 2026, Anahita Laverack, CEO of Oshen, said that the company brought six C-Stars to the exercise, with three equipped with environmental sensors and three with Systems Engineering and Assessment (SEA) omnidirectional trailing hydrophones. The USV can rapidly offload collected data using Iridium satellite communications, Laverack said, with LoRa (Long Range) radio communications, daisy-chaining communications between C-Stars, being a possible future avenue of development. Small constellations of C-Stars are controlled by Oshen's Lighthouse software. As Oshen scales to the company's intended capability to control larger constellations of over 1,000 C-Stars, the Lighthouse software will change and improve internally, but retain its name, Laverack said.