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Competitors at the previous SPRIND Autonomous Drone Challenge Felix Adler for SPRIND A new technology challenge backed by the German government offers up to half a million Euros ($569k) each to teams developing precise drone navigation without satellites. The particular applications are last-mile delivery and search and rescue, but this is a dual-use technology which may also be used for defense applications. The challenge is needed because the market has so far failed to deliver this crucial capability. “To start, technologically, it’s really hard,” Jano Costard, Head of Challenges at SPRIND is Germany’s Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation, told me. “In military applications, such as those in Ukraine, pragmatic alternatives like fiber optic drones have been adopted because immediate functionality is critical. In the civilian space, the commercial use of [autonomously navigating] drones in a widespread manner has not been realized yet.” This 2025-2026 Fully Autonomous Flight 2.0 Challenge is the latest funding phase of a continuing program to encourage multinational innovation in autonomous drones. Lost Without Satellites Satellite navigation, and GPS in particular, have become ubiquitous. GPS circuitry is tiny and costs just a few dollars, and satellite navigation by phone has become so much a part of life that the paper maps, street directories, and road atlases familiar to the older generation have virtually disappeared. Europe spent an estimated 10 billion Euros and 17 years on its Galileo satellite navigation system, an alternative to the GPS NavStar constellation operated by the U.S. military which took 20 years and cost around $18 billion – plus another billion or two a year to maintain. But recent events have made it clear that satellite navigation no longer cuts it. System like this Russian electronic warfare unit can blank out satellite navigation over a wide area Russian MoD The faint signal from…

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Filed under: News - @ May 29, 2025 10:30 am