Sovereign Hunter

Leonardo UK has carried out the UK’s first full scale demonstration of decentralised autonomous collaborative platform swarming. The ambitious programme developed new platforms and autonomy capability from concept to demonstration in just six months, successfully underwriting the value of the company’s innovative approach to collaboration with small-to-medium enterprise (SME) businesses. The activity has demonstrated Leonardo UK’s commitment to the uncrewed air system sector, and its intention to use SME partnering to bring new agility to its response.

The Challenge

Operational teams need mission-level autonomy that meaningfully reduces operator burden while remaining exportable and free from critical foreign dependencies. Leonardo recognises that much of the innovation sits within UK SMEs, yet these smaller companies often face barriers engaging with primes and UK Ministry of Defence (MOD). Leonardo consequently set out to prove a fast, fair and sovereign route from SME innovation to an integrated, certified end capability.

Approach: SME Collaboration Partner Programme

The SME Collaboration Partner Programme is Leonardo’s strategic initiative for engaging select UK SMEs through long-term, outcome-driven partnerships, moving beyond transactional supply to co-creation, shared roadmaps and repeatable adoption paths. It is explicitly not an M&A initiative; the goal is supply chain resilience and national capability breadth, not vertical integration.

What SMEs gain in practice

Access to R&D funding and product development contracts
Advice and expertise (technical, fundraising, export, regulatory, legal)
Access to data, compute, test facilities and equipment
Joint business development and inclusion in bids
Introductions across the supply chain and partner network
Scale, exposure, credibility and market reach

The Programme is delivered in partnership with Form1 Partners, a UK commercialisation specialist, helping scale SME IP into sustainable businesses that deliver credible capability at pace.

Partnerships in Action

Faculty: Led delivery of the Mission Agent, the advanced, AI-driven software layer that acts as the sovereign ‘brain’ for the autonomous fleet.
Volander: delivers a sovereign Class-2 (~25 kg) fixed-wing UAS platform, validated in austere UK range conditions with edge processing, custom optics and multi-bearer communications.
Applied AGI: integrates proprietorial advanced machine learning solutions (BEACONN® and SENSORIUM®) and edge inference, including its rapid NOVATOR® in-field retraining workflows.

Deliverables

Objective: Prove a UK-sovereign distributed autonomous control system that coordinates multiple UAS to execute a simplified EO F2T2EA vignette (Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, Assess), with edge-based Level-4 autonomy, ITAR-free, payload-agnostic and hosted on a sovereign Class-2 platform.

Delivered via the SME Collaboration Partner Programme: Sovereign Hunter was executed through the Programme, bringing Leonardo, Volander, Applied AGI and Faculty together as a single, hybrid delivery team.

Six-month path to demonstration: From contract to live trial in six months, using short sprints, shared test ranges and Continuous Integration /Continuous Delivery for flight code.

Faculty: Enabled mission-level swarm coordination, dynamic in-air replanning and reduced operator interventions, allowing multiple uncrewed platforms to communicate and collaborate on complex tasks.
Volander: electronic and multi-bearer communication architecture, optical payload design, platform development, sortie and flight safety planning.
Applied AGI: BEACONN^® ATR at the edge; rapid in-field retraining; ground applications for inference streaming and sensor control.

Compliance and safety. Operations were conducted under CAA permissions with a documented safety case and range procedures, including air/ground risk assessment, NOTAMs, observers and mitigations.

Key Outcomes

UK first: successful live demonstration of multiple UAS completing a single operator-defined mission with mission-level autonomy and edge ATR, delivered by a UK cohort under a UK-sovereign stack.
ITAR-free, payload-agnostic integration pattern validated.
Edge autonomy and ATR performance demonstrated; continued mission under injected loss/failure.
Repeatable trials safety and management package established.
Cadence proven: concept-to-trial in six months under the partnership model.

Why it matters: sovereign capability and resilience

The programme advances a UK-controlled autonomy stack: algorithms, CONOPS and safety, while broadening the domestic supply base across software, airframes and mission systems. For MOD/DSTL, it demonstrates a pragmatic path to reducing operator workload, iterating faster with SMEs and fielding exportable capability (subject to controls). For industry, it shows a repeatable way to bring SME innovation to credible, integrated outcomes without eroding SME independence.

What's next?

Version 2.0 (2026) of Sovereign Hunter will target Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) communications, sovereign navigation, larger swarm sizes and enhanced EW resilience, alongside expanded user evaluation events and additional SME on-ramps through the Programme.

Leonardo

"This first Sovereign Hunter trial has been a great success both technically and commercially for Leonardo UK and it’s SME partners. The ability to deliver in an aggressive timescale must be entirely credited to the responsiveness of the combined Faculty AI, Applied AGI and Volander team. The positive outcomes extend far beyond the technical achievements, proving that together we can respond to the emerging requirement for mass effects using a novel business model that delivers benefits to all participants."

Faculty

"AI will underpin how countries defend themselves for decades, with sovereign capabilities critical for national security. This partnership shows what’s possible when primes team up with dynamic SMEs: powerful technology, built safely, ethically and domestically. It’s a template of how the UK can ensure it has robust, reliable and genuinely sovereign assets for years to come."

Volander

"This trial has seen all parties working together at a very fast pace to both develop and integrate a multitude of new British-made technologies. This project timeline demanded quick progress concurrently on multiple technical areas. Key to this was Leonardo’s approach to focus on both outcomes and co-operation to achieve quick solutions to risk and challenges along the way. Leonardo and the other partners pulled in the same direction throughout to deliver working demonstrations of multiple sovereign technologies throughout the trial. We look forward to phase 2!"

Applied AGI

"Sovereign Hunter has provided a valuable opportunity to deliver our UK sovereign BEACONN^® ATR capability at the edge and at pace, to demonstrate the power of converged networked effects. Supported by our long-term collaboration with Leonardo and in partnership with Faculty AI and Volander, Sovereign Hunter shows how this business model delivers innovation by integrating novel technologies into a single coherent capability. Aside from the tech gains, Sovereign Hunter demonstrates the substantial outcomes possible from effective collaboration in line with UK Government’s strategic aim of fostering defence supply chain partnering. "

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Sovereign Hunter

Leonardo

Faculty

Volander

Applied AGI