Risk, robustness and resilience for autonomous vehicles in military operations

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  • EU Open Calls
Risk, robustness and resilience for autonomous vehicles in military operations Projects funded
  • Coordinators: European Defence Fund (EDF)
  • Opening of application: 18 February 2025
  • Allocated budget: max. 20 M€ of eligible costs (lump sum)
  • End of applications: 16 October 2025
  • Project duration: between 12 and 48 months
  • Project submitted on: Open calls

Objective

Develop advanced cybersecurity solutions tailored to unmanned autonomous systems (UxVs) to address emerging cyber-physical threats, protect sensor-driven decision-making, ensure data integrity and system availability, and enable secure deployment of UxVs in real-world military missions under evolving operational and environmental attack vectors.

Priorities

▶️ Identify and evaluate complex trade-offs between data protection, cybersecurity and assured autonomy to best support a mission.

▶️ Automate parts of the analysis process to handle the complexity of this task, including processing large amount of data, reducing costs and risks associated with testing physical systems, and producing structured and traceable documentation.

▶️ Ensure resilient UxVs to minimise consequences and allowed for alternative ways to complete the mission autonomously in case of successful cyber-attacks.

Eligibility

To be eligible, all applicants (beneficiaries and affiliated entities) must cumulatively :

  • be legal entities (public or private bodies);
  • be established in one of the eligible countries, to be verified in the specifications.

Eligible activities

All categories must be addressed

Generating knowledge :

  • Develop suitable military scenarios where autonomous vehicles are applied, including mission objectives and mission risks.
  • Attack modelling and catalogue of threats/attacks suitable for both the vehicles and given scenarios.
  • Catalogues of assets/functionality/capabilities required to perform the mission/scenario.
  • Catalogue of security controls and measures; both to prevent attacks and to detect and respond. These are to be cyber-physical and may be both in the cyber and physical domain.

    Integrating knowledge :

    • Develop and/or enhance simulation environments (digital twins) in order to simulate scenarios, including applying attacks and defensive measures (both in cyber and physical domain).
    • Development, adaption and/or enhancement of suitable preventive security measures/controls for autonomous cyber defence.
    • Development of monitoring and detection capabilities, possibly based on AI, for autonomous cyber defence.
    • Development of capabilities to understand and contextualise detected incidents, events and produce suitable response based on risk and mission goal, which can be autonomously applied to environment.

    Studies :

    • Ethical and legal considerations for autonomous cyber defence in such cyber-physical domain.
    • Understand effect and limitation of preventive security measures.

    Design :

    • Proof of concept implementation of autonomous cyber defence with both preventive measures and abilities to detect and respond to cyber-attacks.
    • Test of implementation in realistic military operational scenarios and/or military exercises.
    Would you like to apply ?

    Please follow the link below to the European Commission website

    Details here

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