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• DATE: Wed 21 - Fri 23 October 2026
• VENUE: PVA EXPO PRAGUE
• OFFICIAL LANGUAGE: English
• EVENT FREE REGISTRATION
• EVENT is part of the Future Forces Exhibition & Forum 2026

S-Tech Talks: Uncrewed Warfare – Unsolved Problems

Dates and Times:

• Wednesday, 21 October 15.00 – 17.00
• Thursday, 22 October 10.00 – 12.45

Venue: Innovation Stage, Entrance Hall I

Language: English

S-Tech Talks bring together the people who build, buy, operate and defend against uncrewed systems to discuss the problems that remain unsolved. Across five panels, representatives of industry, armed forces, emergency services and the innovation community go beyond demonstrations and sales pitches to ask what works under operational pressure, who is accountable when it does not, and what has to change on the user’s side as well as the vendor’s. The topics are ground robotics, software for critical infrastructure, the European component base, counter-drone defence and the lessons of Ukraine’s wartime innovation.

Ground Uncrewed Systems

Ground robotics has moved from demonstrations into units, and that is where the hard part starts. Machines that perform on a test range struggle with terrain, jamming, recovery and maintenance once a squad has to run them alone. The obstacle is often not the platform but the training, the doctrine and the fact that no unit has a robot in its establishment tables. A manufacturer, an army trials representative and a NATO army standing up a dedicated robotics unit discuss what a unit can genuinely operate today and what has to change on the user’s side rather than the vendor’s.

Software for Critical Infrastructure

Critical infrastructure is no longer defended by fences. Detection, coordination and crisis response run on software, and increasingly on software that acts on its own. That shifts the question from what to buy to who operates it, who is accountable when it fails and who can actually use it under pressure at three in the morning. With the EU’s NIS2 Directive in force, operators, regulators, soldiers and developers rarely agree on where that responsibility sits. This panel puts them on the same stage to find out where it actually sits.

Proving Europe’s Component Base

Europe has a defence component base. What it has been missing is consistent proof that it works. A component can meet every requirement on a datasheet and still fail once it is integrated: protocols, thermal behaviour, timing and interfaces only reveal their compatibility under real testing. For years price decided, at the expense of qualification and testing, so many European components have never been integrated and proven together in a complete system. With European procurement scaling up and domestic content requirements tightening, the practical question is how fast those components can be proven to work together, and what the qualification path costs a mid-sized supplier along the way.

Layered Counter-UAS

Counter-drone defence is a cost problem before it is a technology problem. Shooting down a cheap airframe with an expensive effector wins the engagement and loses the campaign, so the real question is where the affordable layer sits and what it is allowed to do. It is also an ownership problem: armies, police and infrastructure operators all have a stake and none of them has a clear mandate. A manufacturer, a Ukrainian producer with combat feedback and the users argue it out.

Innovation from Below: What a Fighting Army Buys

Almost every army in Europe is a peacetime army. It writes requirements, runs tenders and fields equipment on a cycle measured in years. On the front line, Ukraine does none of that: a platoon finds a problem, someone in the unit builds an answer, and if it works it spreads along the front before any document catches up. The result is two different armies, one that plans and one that fights, and they increasingly buy different things. This panel asks what really changes when a unit innovates for itself: who pays for it, who certifies it, what gets lost when a field fix has to become a product, and which parts of this are not transferable to an army that nobody is shooting at.

Speakers and moderators represent government organisations, the military, security and emergency services, industry and innovators, and include, for example:

Innovation and Venture Capital

• Defence Hub CzechInvest
• Invest in Bravery
• IRON Cluster
• Tech Horizons

Industry

• S-Tech Group
• Helsing
• Cyber Drone Solutions
• Nemesis Global
• Occam Industries
• TENCORE
• T-Soft
• Componentas
• RACOM
• TAF Industries

Military, Security and Emergency Services

• Canadian Army Land Warfare Centre
• 3rd Assault Brigade, Ukraine
• 12th Special Forces Brigade Azov, Ukraine
• Anti-Aircraft Missile and Artillery Battalion Strazh, 1st Corps Azov, National Guard of Ukraine
• Da Vinci Wolves Battalion, 59th Brigade of the Unmanned Systems Forces of Ukraine
• Azov Foreign Legion, Ukraine
• Fire Rescue Service of the Czech Republic