EDF 2026: AI-based tactical situational awareness with swarms of small robots and drones (technological challenge)

Scope:
Assisting soldiers with robots and drones that can provide accurate tactical situational awareness by using AI becomes essential for soldier protection. This call topic aims to follow on and complement previous activities in the field of hidden threat detection and explore solutions involving various combinations of intelligent robots, drones and sensing technologies for advanced detection and recognition of threats, in view of their avoidance or neutralisation.
These solutions should be tested under realistic scenarios in a comparable and objective manner to reach up to Technical Readiness Level (TRL) 6. For that purpose, each consortium supported through this call topic will benefit from a common testing environment set up as part of a technological challenge and will have to participate in the experiment campaigns organised with this objective.
Beyond defence technologies, this topic also contributes to the STEP objectives as defined in the STEP Regulation in the target investment area of deep and digital technologies.
Targeted types of activities:
Generating knowledge, not excluding upstream and downstream activities eligible for research actions.
Indicative budget:
EUR 23 000 000 for this topic under the EDF-2026-LS-RA-CHALLENGE call.
Indicative number of proposals to be funded:
Several proposals may be funded for this topic.
Range of the financial contribution of the EU per proposal:
The requested funding cannot exceed EUR 4 600 000.

Conditions:
Conditions
1. Admissibility Conditions: Proposal page limit and layout
described in section 5 of the
call document
.
Proposal page limits and layout:
described in Part B of the Application Form available in the Submission System.
2. Eligible Countries
described in section 6 of the
call document
.
3. Other Eligible Conditions
described in section 6 of the
call document
.
4. Financial and operational capacity and exclusion
described in section 7 of the
call document
.
5a. Evaluation and award: Submission and evaluation processes
described section 8 of the
call document
and the
Online Manual
.
5b. Evaluation and award: Award criteria, scoring and thresholds
described in section 9 of the
call document
.
5c. Evaluation and award: Indicative timeline for evaluation and grant agreement
described in section 4 of the
call document
.
6. Legal and financial set-up of the grants
described in section 10 of the
call document
.
Call document and annexes:
Call document
Application form templates
Standard application form (EDF)
— the application form specific to this call is available in the Submission System
Detailed budget table (EDF LS RA)
Participant information (EDF)
List of infrastructure, facilities, assets and resources (EDF)
Actual indirect cost methodology declaration (EDF)
Ownership control declaration
Ownership control guarantee
PRS declaration (EDF)
Model Grant Agreements (MGA)
EDF, ASAP and EDIRPA Lump Sum MGA
Additional documents:
EDF Annual Work Programme
EDF Regulation 2021/697
EDF Programme Security Instruction (PSI)
Guidelines on FSTP implementation - WP2026
EU Financial Regulation 2024/2509
Rules for Legal Entity Validation, LEAR Appointment and Financial Capacity Assessment
EU Grants AGA — Annotated Model Grant Agreement
Funding & Tenders Portal Online Manual
Funding & Tenders Portal Terms and Conditions
Funding & Tenders Portal Privacy Statement