Deadline: 15-Oct-2025
The Drone Defense Hackathon invites students to push the limits of drone innovation, encouraging bold ideas, smart approaches, inspiring use cases, and powerful storytelling.
Winning teams will share a grand prize of €20,000, and may also receive opportunities for industry immersion, mentorship, incubation, and recruitment.
Participants are encouraged to select one of the four big challenges of the hackathon: Autonomy to act, Cooperate to prevail, Detect to understand, and Deliver in crisis. Most challenges come with sub-challenges, and teams are welcome to pick one or several to maximize impact and scoring potential.
Challenge 1 – Autonomy to act focuses on ensuring that one or more drones can carry out a mission autonomously. Sub-challenges include recognition of vehicle vulnerabilities, precise estimation of an object’s position, simplified voice commands, circuit monitoring with anomaly detection, guided landing on a target, discreet reactivation of a sleeping drone, and stabilization after high-altitude release.
Challenge 2 – Cooperate to prevail aims at coordinating several drones to carry out a collective mission more effectively than a single isolated drone. Sub-challenges include combined action on a target, coordinated neutralization, simultaneous attack from several points, synchronized swarm flight, simulating or jamming communications, distribution of roles in a mission, tracking a leader, and localization by radio direction finding.
Challenge 3 – Detect to understand explores how drones can detect, analyze, and transmit critical information in real time during fires, floods, or defense operations. Sub-challenges include victim detection, environmental analysis, tracking thermal traces, digital emissions monitoring, and ground threat detection.
Challenge 4 – Deliver in crisis examines how drones can be used to deliver critical equipment reliably and quickly. This challenge cannot be broken down into sub-challenges, and participants must design a comprehensive logistics solution combining software and operational protocols to identify demand, assign missions, and execute autonomous delivery.
The hackathon is open exclusively to students enrolled in French higher education institutions or recent graduates under two years, and participants may compete individually or in teams of up to six members.
Deliverables for Round One include CVs, explanatory paragraphs, and two-page PDFs describing the challenges and proposed solutions. Selected teams advance to the Final Round, where projects are presented orally, potentially supported by simulations, demonstrations, or videos.
Projects will be evaluated based on criteria such as flight stability, coordination efficiency, relevance of data detection, software scalability, originality, and number of sub-challenges completed.
The deadline for applications is 15 October 2025.
For more information, visit Agorize.