The trial week of the first technological challenge of the European research project ORDEAL – Operational Resilience of Drones in Experiments and Autonomous fLight was successfully held last week at the NATO Missile Firing Range / NAMFI in Chania, Crete. The event brought together 65 researchers, engineers, and representatives of participating teams from across Europe, who tested and evaluated innovative algorithms for autonomous navigation under real-world field conditions.
Funded by the European Defence Fund, ORDEAL aims to assess and enhance the operational resilience of autonomous drone and swarm systems in highly demanding environments. FORTH-ICS actively contributes to the organization of the challenge through the Computational Vision and Robotics Laboratory / CVRL, with the participation of Prof. Panos Trahanias, Michael Maravgakis, and Michael Vangos.
This trial phase marked an important milestone for the project, supporting valuable data collection, the testing of evaluation procedures, and networking within the European research community. The first official pan-European ORDEAL challenge is expected to take place in Chania in the first days of November.
