We won EUDIS Portugal.

Quick update from the UB Robotics team, we took first place on the Tekever track, Motherships & Hybrid Swarms, at the EUDIS Defence Hackathon 2026, Portugal edition.

It ran from 15 to 17 October at the Mercado Municipal de Leiria, organised by Startup Leiria, 48 hours of building, sleeping bags and late-night prototyping, and the theme of this autumn edition across Europe was autonomy. We took on two challenges, Motherships & Hybrid Swarms and GNSS-Denied Navigation, and that second one is pretty much the problem UBR was started for, what happens to robots when GPS and the network are gone.

What we brought was the UBR Brain running a mixed fleet, a couple of UGVs, a UAV and a Unitree G1 humanoid we integrated into our stack during the weekend itself, all under one operator. Our ground station is the mothership, the operator sends one task, two UGVs go out searching, and the first one to find the target triggers the next step, the drone takes off to confirm and the G1 acknowledges. The UGVs don’t use GPS to drive at all, they navigate on onboard sensors and depth, and when the link is gone the robots find each other over ESP-NOW peer radio and converge on the finder by themselves, 92% of them reach it in simulation, and we calibrated it in the lab with two boards. Range past 20 to 30 metres is not solved yet, and that’s what we’re working on next. We build the intelligence, not the robots, and the point was to show that the same brain can run on very different machines and still work as one fleet.

The same week we were field testing at Naval-REX, we ended that exercise in Tróia, packed everything up and drove up to Leiria to compete, and all this while making several field trips to factories and warehouses, always with critical infrastructure defence in mind. We try to spend as little time as possible in the lab, the brain lives outside it, we’re always out testing in the field.

In between the hacking we were testing the fleet in an empty hall next door, and we even took the G1 for a walk through the local market.

The team in Leiria was Filipe Martins, Francisco Leal, Rodrigo Capeleiro, Ruben Dinis and Pedro Oliveira. A big thank you to Startup Leiria for an event that was really well run, and to Tekever for the mentorship and for the €5,000 award.

You can watch our pitch here.

Winning the local edition puts us in the EUDIS mentorship programme for the next two months. It kicks off on 27 October, then comes the Defence Innovation Meetup and Bootcamp in Warsaw from 18 to 20 November, and it ends with an EU-wide online pitch competition in December, where the top three teams get to pitch at a European defence event. We want to be one of those three. EUDIS also opened some doors for us, with other defence providers, with the Navy and the armed forces, and with critical infrastructure owners and businesses.

For us this is less about the trophy and more about proof, the brain held up outside the lab, under time pressure and in front of people who know defence, and the same thing that matters there matters in civil defence and in factories, robots that keep working when everything around them stops.

UB Robotics builds intelligence for autonomous fleets of robots working together with humans, helping businesses and institutions apply physical AI.