Deadline Date: September 29, 2026
The European Commission is seeking grant applications to strengthen soldier protection through AI-powered robots and drones that enhance tactical situational awareness in complex environments.
The focus areas, include assisting soldiers with AI-enabled robots and drones; advancing hidden threat detection; combining intelligent robots, drones, and sensing technologies for detection and classification of threats; testing solutions under realistic and comparable conditions up to TRL 6; establishing a common technological challenge test environment; participating in evaluation campaigns; contributing to STEP objectives in deep and digital technologies; generating knowledge through research actions; assessing AI support in dynamic environments; integrating technologies into unmanned collaborative platforms; autonomous deployment of robot and drone swarms; real-time data fusion from visual, radar, acoustic, and environmental sensors; AI-driven threat analysis and prioritisation; and dynamic adaptation to environmental changes.
This call supports the development of integrated unmanned ground and aerial systems equipped with advanced sensors to automatically detect and recognise threats. Solutions must provide real-time, unified situational awareness and be tested in a shared environment to ensure objective evaluation.
The proposed systems are expected to integrate multiple sensing technologies and ensure that gathered information is processed in real time to provide a unified situational awareness picture. By fusing data from various sources, the systems should support informed decision-making in dynamic and challenging scenarios.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning play a central role in analysing fused data, identifying patterns, and detecting and prioritising potential threats or areas of interest. The solutions must also be capable of adapting to changing environmental conditions, such as variations in weather, lighting, or obstacles, in order to maintain optimal performance.
The indicative budget for this topic is EUR 23,000,000, within an overall budget of EUR 30,000,000. Eligible applicants must be legal entities established in EU Member States, including overseas countries and territories, or in listed EEA countries and countries associated with the EDF Programme. They must have their executive management structure established in eligible countries and must not be subject to control by a non-associated third country or entity, unless appropriate guarantees are approved by the relevant national authority.
For more information, visit European Commission.
