Prague – September 11, 2026 -- Fly4Future, a Czech drone technology firm, presented the best-performing search-and-rescue solution among all competitors at the SPRIND Funke Fully Autonomous Flight 2.0 finals held August 24-27, 2026, at the former military airfield Fliegerhorst Erding in Bavaria, and is now seeking German investors, industry partners and customers to move the technology into production.
Team F4F & CTU SkyGraph outperformed rivals in locating injured persons
The team, a joint project between Fly4Future and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University (CVUT) in Prague, competed as F4F & CTU SkyGraph and delivered the top solution for the competition's search-and-rescue task, in which a fully autonomous flying robot had to locate injured people across open terrain. "The team showed the best solution in the discipline of searching for an injured person and convinced the jury with the most general solution with the greatest commercial potential," said Kilian Seitz, SPRIND competition organizer.
At the closing investor day on August 27, the team was the only participant to complete its assigned tasks repeatedly and error-free, winning both demonstration disciplines for which it had qualified. Austria's University of Klagenfurt team HERMES took the overall competition win. Germany's UBASWARM, a collaboration between start-up Autonx and TU Berlin, and Switzerland's Avientus AG with its RadNav system also qualified for the final investor presentation.
Drone executes natural-language commands without GPS or pilot control
The Fly4Future-CVUT drone converts spoken or written instructions into a mission plan, maps unknown environments, searches for target objects and determines how to complete tasks safely -- without GPS and without pilot intervention during flight. All computation runs onboard, meaning no image or operational data is transmitted to external cloud servers, a feature the company positions as critical for industrial, critical-infrastructure, security and rescue deployments.
"We can build autonomous drones controllable with natural language. Fly4Future has experience developing and delivering complete drone systems, so we can move from demonstration to pilot production and concrete customer projects," said Professor Martin Saska, founder of Fly4Future.
Company targets pilot production after years of delivering drone platforms to dozens of countries
Fly4Future has for several years developed, built, tested and delivered complete autonomous drone platforms for industrial and specialized applications to customers in dozens of countries. The company controls the full technology chain, from GPS-free autonomous flight and swarm capability to drone construction and onboard sensor, camera, LiDAR and computer integration -- allowing the SPRIND-tested technology to be integrated directly into existing platforms and prepared for pilot production.
Fly4Future pursues a European supply chain to rival U.S. and Asian systems
"Europe needs its own autonomous systems over which it retains control of development, data and direction. We want to build a European product that can compete with solutions from the U.S. and Asia. Germany is a natural place for us to find investors, industry partners and customers," said Vera Saskova, CEO of Fly4Future.
Test flights exposed technical limits in lighting and landing-site selection
The four final tasks simulated delivery, rescue-dispatch and security-monitoring scenarios. Changing light conditions hampered color recognition, glass reflections distorted person detection, and during one rescue mission the drone favored a technically safe landing site over one practically accessible to the injured person -- issues the company says will feed into further product development.
Fly4Future opens talks with German financial and strategic investors
The 14-month SPRIND competition, backed by a budget exceeding five million euros, reached its climax at the end of August 2026. Fly4Future is now pursuing a capital and business partnership to fund pilot production, certification, supply-chain expansion and sales and service capacity for the German market, and has begun discussions with German financial investors, strategic investors, industrial integrators and potential customers.