TacEdge 2026
Sensing, communications and autonomy in contested environments.
TacEdge brings together researchers and practitioners working on sensing, communications and autonomy for contested environments: RF and optical surveillance, tactical telecommunications, and applied AI in the field.
Equipment in the field has to work with contested spectrum, intermittent links and whatever processing fits on the platform. The workshop is about methods that hold up under those constraints.
The morning is two keynotes and two talk sessions. The afternoon is three hands-on tutorials across two parallel slots, and the day closes with a 105-minute autonomous robot capture-the-flag competition.
It is aimed at researchers, Defence and defence-industry practitioners, and graduate students. Demonstrations run continuously through the day, including passive RF sensing and an educational robot arena.
TacEdge 2026 is the first of what is intended to become an annual workshop.
Provisional — sessions and timings subject to change
Three hands-on tutorials run in two parallel slots. Bring a laptop.
Working with software-defined radio to capture, visualise and characterise signals — from finding a carrier in the noise floor to identifying what is transmitting and when.
Taking Sentinel-1 radar data through calibration, speckle reduction and terrain correction, then reading the result against optical imagery of the same ground — what each sensor shows, and what can actually be concluded from it.
Training and running current detector architectures on real imagery, with attention to the constraints that matter at the edge — small targets, limited data, and inference on modest hardware.
An asymmetric two-against-two autonomous robot game, run as the closing session of the day. Teams of two to four write the strategy; the robots execute it without human control.
One side attacks and the other defends, and the two sides do not have the same capabilities. Teams develop and test their attack and defence strategies during the session; nothing on the arena is driven by hand.
The build phase runs against a simulator rather than the arena, so every team can keep testing continuously. LLM assistance is available throughout it.
Qualifying runs go against a reference defender across parallel simulators. The top four teams go through to a knockout bracket on the physical arena, and the day closes with the awards.
Bring a laptop. The rules, the API documentation and the context pack for LLM assistance will be published here ahead of the event.
How the 105 minutes run
Tell us you are coming, or put your hand up to speak, demonstrate or enter the robot competition. Full registration opens closer to the date.
Email us with the details below and we will keep you posted. An online form will replace this once the registration tool is settled.
We will use your details only to contact you about TacEdge 2026.