Lobster helps secure seabed infrastructure in Baltic at SeaSec 2026

From 13 to 24 April 2026, Lobster Robotics participated in DATA2SEA, the 2026 edition of the SeaSec Challenge Weeks. The exercise ran in the Baltic Sea at the Digital Ocean Lab in Mecklenburg Bight and from the naval base in Rostock, hosted by the German Navy and operated by the Rostock Institute for Ocean Technologies. Lobster deployed Scout 3 across the full two-week programme, contributing to both the platform protection and cable protection vignettes.

SeaSec is run by the Northern Naval Capability Cooperation, an alliance of the Ministries of Defence of Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. The Challenge Weeks bring industry, governments, navies, and research organisations together in a live exercise focused on the protection of critical underwater infrastructure. Industry consortia operate as blue teams, the participating navies operate as red team, and the trials run in real Baltic conditions. The 2026 edition, DATA2SEA, focuses specifically on sensor data fusion to contribute to a layered, consolidated operational picture.

Scout's role: the identification layer

Lobster contributed the identification layer in both vignettes. Scout 3 was tasked against acoustic contacts produced by partner sensors and against positions where red-team operators were observed dropping objects on the seabed. The workflow ran as follows: a contact of interest was passed to the Lobster team in the operations room ashore; a high-speed RHIB with a crew of one to two transited to the area and launched Scout 3; the resulting georeferenced optical imagery was returned for assessment by the consortium and the red-team adjudicators.

The capability Lobster brings to a layered architecture is high-resolution optical seabed imaging on cue. When acoustic, sonar, or surface assets generate a contact, Scout produces the georeferenced visual record needed to identify what is on the seabed.

Data fusion: Scout into the common operating picture

Each consortium operated a common operating picture in the operations room. Once Scout completed an identification run, its output was pushed automatically into that picture, where partners could view the optical evidence alongside the acoustic, sonar, and surface tracks that had generated the original contact. Across the two weeks, several detection modalities fed the same picture and a single seabed-imaging response asset closed the loop on the contacts they generated.

Three consortia

DATA2SEA was contested by six consortia. Lobster joined three of them: AAMI, Blueshield, and E-Guard. Consortium formation began in October 2025, giving teams time to agree on data formats, tasking procedures, and integration into the shared C2 picture before arriving in Rostock.

Three of the six DATA2SEA consortia integrated Scout 3 into their architecture in the months before the exercise. Each of them was solving the same problem: the detection layer generates a contact, and identification is needed to classify the threat. Scout 3 deploys from a small footprint, is tasked from the operations room, and returns high-resolution georeferenced imagery of the seabed. Across all three consortia, this allowed the blue team to classify threats quickly and with confidence.

Across the three consortia Lobster operated alongside partners including Teledyne Marine, Teledyne FLIR, Fugro, Optics11, Alcatel Submarine Networks, and Esri, among others.

Trajectory

Lobster's participation in DATA2SEA sits within a sequence of allied programmes the company has been selected for or fielded under:

• NATO DIANA (2023 – 2025) — selected from over 1,300 applicants. Phase 1 and Phase 2 completed.

• Royal Netherlands Navy under RAAP (June 2025) — first allied customer. Contract signed at the NATO Summit in The Hague by Deputy Minister of Defence Gijs Tuinman and CEO Stephan Rutten.

• REPMUS 2025 (Portugal) — Dutch naval operators reached independent use within three days of training. Seabed targets identified within twenty minutes of tasking, interoperable with US Navy.

• SeaSec 2025 (North Sea) — the only participating system to identify seabed anomalies in the turbid conditions of the Hague trial area.

• SeaSec 2026 (Baltic) — full programme participation across three consortia, in the platform and cable vignettes.

Lobster works with the NNCC, with NATO, and with allied industry partners to counter sabotage, unauthorised survey, and grey-zone interference against the subsea cables, pipelines, and offshore platforms that carry European data, energy, and communications.