Sapience Competition 3

Autonomous Multi-Agent Search and Rescue at Unmanned Valley, the Netherlands

Taking the System Abroad: Unmanned Valley, the Netherlands

The third Sapience competition took our team and our autonomy stack to Unmanned Valley in the Netherlands — a dedicated drone field-lab on a former naval airbase near Katwijk, purpose-built for testing unmanned systems under realistic conditions.

Building on the architecture proven in the first and second competitions, we deployed our multi-agent search-and-rescue system in a new environment, against new mission scenarios, and once again fully autonomously.

Demo

🎬 Demo video coming soon — mission footage from the Unmanned Valley deployment is being edited.

System Architecture

The full system architecture of our multi-agent autonomy stack — onboard perception, state estimation, planning and decision-making, with every component running on the vehicles themselves.

The stack that flew in the Netherlands is the third generation of our architecture: GPS-denied visual-inertial localization with redundant odometry sources, real-time semantic mapping, and a behavior-tree-based mission executive coordinating multiple agents — all without external computation or a communication lifeline.

Results

Final numbers are being compiled — the table below will be filled with the official mission results.

Mission Task Result
Mission 1 TBD TBD
Mission 2 TBD TBD
Mission 3 TBD TBD

Lessons Learned

To be done — a detailed write-up of what worked, what broke in the field, and what changed in the architecture as a result.