Victory for the Force W team, led by Thales, which won first place in the CoHoMa II challenge.

The force W team, led by Thales, has won the second edition of the CoHoMa challenge. On June 26 at the Cercle des Armées, General Quevilly awarded first place to the team comprising Thales, SERA Ingénierie, DUMA Engineering, MC-CLIC and H2X. A well-deserved first place after a technological performance and the implementation of innovative solutions to carry out the mission.

Building on the success of the first edition, the French Army has decided to renew the CoHoMa challenge from May 11 to June 07, 2023, to unite robotics players around the theme of "seizing an objective". 15 teams put their robotic solutions to the test in tactical scenarios inspired by contact combat doctrine. 

Thales took part with its partners in Force W, a French and European industrial ecosystem dedicated to robotics applied to contact combat. In a limited timeframe and with only 3 operators, the team had to face a major challenge: neutralize the traps and seize the targets by proposing innovative and coordinated robotic capabilities. At the end of three intense hours, all the mission objectives had been achieved. After deliberation by the jury on various criteria (ubiquity, anticipation, speed of execution, tactical rigor, fluidity of maneuver, resilience), this success has earned Force W its place on the top step of the podium.

By combining first-rate unmanned platforms, a mission system based on the Combat Digital Platform, secure communications resources, autonomy services and their orchestration developed by Thales, Force W was able to respond to a major problem linked to the deployment of large numbers of robotized systems: the need to operate several of these systems with a single operator, while being able to deal with contingencies during the mission and retaining human control. The system deployed in this way enabled a swarm of drones, under the command of a single operator and in cooperation with other resources, to neutralize 80% of the traps.

The innovative solutions deployed (both at unmanned platform and system level) are designed to maintain the technical and operational lead built up on SCORPION and UAS SMDR system operations, by providing a system of ground and airborne robots in support of contact combat.