NATO, Ukraine, and the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) this week awarded cash prizes to companies and a university team for their solutions for automated guidance on the battlefield of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in the final mile.
The two-day UAS hackathon was hosted by DIU in Poland to quickly find solutions to challenges on the battlefield where drone operations are challenged by enemy jamming, line-of-sight control limitations, and user capabilities, DIU said on Thursday.
“Improving UAS autonomous capabilities has the potential to mitigate existing shortfalls through removing dependency on a radio control link and by shifting the operator to a supervisory and decision-making ‘on-the-loop’ role, instead of a skill-based and technically intensive ‘in the loop’ role,” DIU said.
The $50,000 first place price went to the team of Ukraine-based Sensorama Lab and KEF Robotics, which is based in Pittsburgh and has an office in Norway. Europe’s codeQuest won $15,000 and AI Autonomix won $10,000. Five teams won $5,000 each and included Poland’s AGH University for visual identification, NordaDynamics for visual navigation, FoxFour.ai and GCH Technologies for overall potential, and the multi-national Team Blackjack for international cooperations.
In all, 13 teams competed in the engineering and design sprint that was held as part of the three-day NATO-Ukraine Defense Innovators Forum in Krakow. DIU said that select top teams also received non-cash prizes to help them scale their solutions.
Both sides in the Russo-Ukraine War have had success jamming each other’s small drones that are used to conduct surveillance and targeting operations on the battlefield and as one-way attack munitions. U.S. companies are developing solutions to enable drones and smart munitions to operate effectively in contested environments.
“This event is another lever the DoD can use to deliver technologies to support Ukraine in its fight for sovereignty and freedom,” Liz McNally, deputy director for commercial operations at DIU, said at the hackathon.