iMUGS2, the second stage of the EU's Integrated Modular Unmanned Ground System programme, will conclude with a three-day exercise in Norway in 2028, Shephard Media reported on 11 August, with a third stage already under consideration1. The consortium launched in November 2025 and runs to 29 partners across 15 EU countries, coordinated by Estonia's Milrem Robotics, with KNDS France, KNDS Germany, Diehl Defence, Safran Electronics and Defense and Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace among the named participants2.
An uncrewed ground vehicle (UGV) is a driverless land robot, used for resupply, scouting and casualty evacuation. Fifteen national fleets bought separately will each arrive with their own controller, their own radio waveform and their own map format. A Latvian operator cannot then drive a Dutch vehicle when the Dutch one is the one still running. Writing a shared control standard early is cheap; retrofitting one across fielded fleets is not.
The factories opened before the standard did. Milrem started a THeMIS production line with VDL Defentec at Born in the Netherlands in June and signed two non-binding memoranda at Eurosatory a fortnight later. Kongsberg now sits inside the land programme as well as the undersea contest it entered in June, giving one Norwegian group visibility across both halves of Europe's uncrewed procurement.
A 2028 exercise date does useful work on its own. Suppliers building to a deadline they cannot miss make interface decisions two years earlier than commercial incentives would have forced them to.
