TROJAN. An uncrewed drone carrier for Baltic infrastructure protection, funded with 37.9 million złoty

The Polish Naval Academy in Gdynia will lead a consortium building an uncrewed surface platform capable of carrying aerial and underwater drones. Project TROJAN has received 37,906,642 złoty from the PERUN programme, the second largest award in the competition's final round. The seven-member consortium includes the Ship Design and Research Centre in Gdańsk, and the platform's declared applications include monitoring and warning of threats to critical maritime infrastructure. The contracts were signed on 23 July in Warsaw.

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25 july 2026   |   14:15   |   Source: Gazeta Morska   |   Prepared by: Kamil Kusier   |   Print

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Not a patrol drone but a mother ship for other uncrewed systems

The shorthand that suggests itself on reading the announcements runs: an uncrewed vessel to watch cables on the Baltic seabed. It is imprecise and worth correcting at once, because it misses what the project is.

The full title of the undertaking is "uncrewed surface platform for carrying aerial and underwater sensors for the purpose of monitoring and warning of threats to critical maritime infrastructure". The words about carrying are the key. The intended output is a surface vessel that is itself a carrier, with the sensors and vehicles, both airborne and submersible, constituting its payload. The official description adds that the platform will also be able to support observation of ports, shipping lanes and important objects at sea.

The consequences of that architecture reach further than the title says. As the defence portal Defence24 notes, what systems will be carried in future remains an open question, and from the platform's point of view it makes no difference whether they are reconnaissance assets, threat-warning systems, or effectors capable of eliminating those threats. The same analysis points out that Ukraine already operates platforms of a similar class.

In other words, the project's declared purpose is clearly protective, but the carrier concept is by definition neutral as to what is placed on it. That is not a criticism of the consortium but a description of a technology that has reshaped operations in the Black Sea in recent years, and whose development in the Baltic will be watched closely on both sides.

A military university in Gdynia as consortium leader

There are seven participants: the Polish Naval Academy as leader, the Ship Design and Research Centre (CTO S.A.) research and development division, Cree Yacht, Diesel Air Jarosław Kumorek, the Polish Air Force University at Dęblin, the Silesian University of Technology and the Military University of Technology in Warsaw.

The Naval Academy's role deserves emphasis, since individual partners' statements tend to place it on a level with the rest. The Gdynia military university is running the project, not participating in it on equal terms with the others. For an institution simultaneously developing its conference and training activity around uncrewed systems, this materially strengthens its position within the national defence research system.

The consortium's composition reads as a division of competences. The Naval Academy contributes operational knowledge of maritime activity and of threats to undersea infrastructure. The Military University of Technology and the Silesian University of Technology cover engineering and systems work. The Air Force University at Dęblin handles the aerial component, logical enough for a platform carrying flying drones. Cree Yacht and Diesel Air represent the industrial side, responsible for building and propelling the vessel. The Ship Design and Research Centre brings something no one else in Poland has.

Without a model basin, a platform of this kind cannot be designed

The Ship Design and Research Centre operates in the Przymorze district of Gdańsk and is the only facility of its class in the country, and one of few in Europe. It runs a set of model testing basins, including Poland's longest deepwater basin at 270 metres, a cavitation tunnel, an aerodynamic tunnel, and laboratories for fire, vibroacoustic, mechanical and field testing. It also carries out numerical analysis in structural and fluid mechanics.

In practice this means that almost every vessel designed in Poland for the Navy undergoes hydromechanical testing there. For TROJAN the significance is direct and technical rather than reputational.

A platform intended to launch and recover underwater vehicles and aerial drones poses harder hydromechanical demands than a simple patrol craft. It has to maintain stability and predictable behaviour in a seaway under a shifting distribution of mass, because the payload leaves the deck and returns to it. It has to hold position in conditions where launch and recovery are feasible at all. And it needs propulsion characteristics allowing sustained operation at low speeds. Properties of that kind are verified on a model in a basin, not in simulation, and only then is a prototype built.

Where the project sits within PERUN

The contracts were signed on 23 July at the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw, with Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz and Defence Ministry state secretary Cezary Tomczyk in attendance.

This was the final round of competition 1/PERUN/2023, launched by the National Centre for Research and Development at the end of 2023 and covering fifteen thematic areas. Fourteen projects received funding in this round, totalling almost 351 million złoty against a combined project value of some 364 million. Across the whole PERUN programme, in 2025 and 2026, twenty-nine agreements have been signed with total funding of 723.8 million złoty. The money comes from the Ministry of National Defence and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.

TROJAN, catalogued as DOB-PERUN-1-B-037-2023 in thematic area fourteen, received 37,906,642 złoty, the second largest award of the round. By comparison, the ASBL autonomous laser weapon system led by the Military University of Technology received 33 million, the VIDEMUS network-centric reconnaissance system 27.4 million, and the AISearcher detection system 23.8 million.

The proportion is worth noting. In a round dominated by artificial intelligence, laser systems, sensors and ballistic materials, second place by value went to a maritime project. That is an indication of where the defence ministry currently places its research priorities.

Why critical maritime infrastructure ended up in a defence programme

The context of that decision is well documented and explains why the protection of cables and pipelines has ceased to be a civilian matter.

Since January 2025 NATO has run Operation Baltic Sentry in the Baltic, established after a series of damage incidents to undersea power and telecommunications cables involving vessels linked to the Russian shadow fleet. The method recurred: a ship would slow above the infrastructure's route and drag its anchor along the seabed. The scale of the problem drew warships, patrol aircraft and uncrewed systems into seabed protection.

At the same time the number of assets requiring protection keeps growing. Polish waters are a construction site for offshore wind farms, with export cables and offshore substations multiplying, alongside the Baltic Pipe gas pipeline and existing power interconnectors with neighbours. Each is a point on the map that has to be watched, and the number of vessels able to do the watching is not growing at the same rate.

This is where the economic logic of TROJAN lies. Sending a crewed warship to inspect a stretch of cable routinely is expensive and ties up an asset the Navy has little of. An uncrewed platform able to operate longer, more cheaply and without risk to personnel, while carrying its own underwater and aerial vehicles, answers precisely that gap. The carrier also solves the range problem of small drones, which could not reach the site on their own.

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