At the premiere in 2006, the then head of the German Army Office, Major General Wolfgang Korte, made it clear that “ELROB is not a competition, and there will be no winners. Instead, we gain valuable insights for further developments.” ELROB founder Dr Frank E. Schneider, deputy head of the FKIE research department “Cognitive Mobile Systems”, still adheres to this basic principle today. “Twenty years ago, we were already testing capabilities that are urgently needed today in the current crisis hotspots around the world,” he says. “If you like, we were way ahead of our time back then.”

Scenarios are based on current needs

Together with a team from the FKIE, he has continuously adapted the tasks and scenarios for each ELROB edition to the current needs of the military – and thus constantly raised the bar for the participating teams. This will not change in 2026: the teams will compete with their robotic systems in the four main disciplines of Convoy, Reconnaissance, Mule and Search & Rescue (SAR). For the first time, all scenarios will focus on the combined use of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Not without reason, as Schneider emphasises: “Both current operational situations and previous events have clearly shown that the sole use of robots or drones is often not effective. In many cases, better results can be achieved when they are used in combination.”

The Thun military training area – the oldest and, at around 6.5 square kilometres, the largest of its kind in Switzerland – offers ideal conditions for the Land Robot Trial, as the organisers are well aware. ELROB was already held here in 2012, reports Schneider: “And we are delighted to be back here again.”

Robotics experts evaluate the performances

A separate tent city will be set up for the participants, who are travelling from all over Europe. The organisers will use the extensive grounds for the scenarios: in the “Transport” discipline, for example, a delivery must be taken to a warehouse up to six kilometres away using at least two vehicles; in “Reconnaissance”, the teams search for certain objects and create a photorealistic 3D map of the rough terrain. “Mule” is the title of another discipline in which the task is to train a transport robot to travel back and forth between two camps as often as possible within a specified time. In “Search & Rescue”, the teams must search for, locate and finally transport a 70-kilogram dummy doll to the starting point from a roughly known location. An international jury, chaired since 2006 by renowned robotics expert Prof. Henrik I. Christensen, assesses how well the teams solve the respective tasks.

Both the chief judge and organiser Schneider are already eager to see whether and what progress the teams have made over the past two years. Looking back at the first event in 2006, Schneider sees a positive development in any case: “The number of robust systems available on the market has increased significantly,” he says. “And there is a greater awareness of the capabilities that are actually needed in robotic systems today.”

European Land Robot Trial
15 to 19 June 2026
Thun, Switzerland
Registration deadline for teams: 31 January 2026
Information: www.elrob.org

Contact:
Dr Frank E. Schneider, Cognitive Mobile Systems Department
Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE
frank.schneider@fkie.fraunhofer.de I Telephone: +49 228 9435481