The NAVISENSE-X consortium is currently participating in preparatory flight activities at the NATO Missile Firing Installation (NAMFI) in Crete, Greece, as part of the European Defence Fund technological challenge on robust autonomous drone navigation.
The activity brings together the four EDF projects participating in the technological challenge — NAVISENSE-X, ORIGAMI, SNADE and SWARMER — within the common testing environment organised by ORDEAL (Operational Resilience of Drones in Experiments and Autonomous fLight).
The four projects are developing different technological approaches towards resilient autonomous UAV navigation and will be evaluated through a common challenge framework designed to assess their performance under demanding conditions, including environments where GNSS signals may be degraded, denied or otherwise unavailable.
Preparing for the ORDEAL Challenge
The activities at NAMFI represent an important preparatory stage ahead of the forthcoming ORDEAL evaluation campaigns.
The preparatory flights allow the participating projects to operate within the common test environment, familiarise their teams with the operational conditions and procedures, and further prepare their platforms, navigation systems and supporting equipment for the subsequent challenge activities.
For NAVISENSE-X, the activity in Crete represents another important step in the progression from research and development to system integration and structured field evaluation.
It follows the consortium’s integration and test campaign in Athens from 6–10 July 2026, during which the NAVISENSE-X technical teams progressed from laboratory preparation and system integration at UCANDRONE’s premises to operational validation and live flight activities at an aerodrome.
A European Consortium Advancing Resilient Autonomous Navigation
Coordinated by SKYLD Security and Defence Ltd (Cyprus), NAVISENSE-X brings together seven organisations from five European countries:
- SKYLD Security and Defence Ltd – Cyprus, Coordinator
- Neuromorphica Ltd. – Bulgaria
- NeuralAgent GmbH – Germany
- Scertas GmbH – Germany
- University of West Attica – Greece
- UCANDRONE S.A. – Greece
- RSI Europe, UAB – Lithuania
Together, the partners combine expertise in unmanned aerial systems, multi-sensor integration, artificial intelligence, neuromorphic processing, hyperdimensional computing, autonomous navigation and distributed intelligence.
NAVISENSE-X is developing technologies for resilient autonomous UAV navigation in GNSS-denied and electromagnetically challenged environments, integrating heterogeneous onboard sensing with advanced AI-enabled processing and distributed approaches supporting cooperative and swarm-based operations.
