Fly4Future

Fly4Future, s.r.o. is a Czech company that develops autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles with on-board artificial intelligence. It was founded in 2017 as a spin-off of the Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) group in the Department of Cybernetics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU). The founder is Dr. Martin Saska, who heads the MRS group. The company's registered address is in Ostrava-Mariánské Hory, and it also has an office in Prague.

Fly4Future designs and builds custom autonomous drones for industrial and academic customers, and says its platforms can be adapted to more than 15 industries, including inspection, surveillance, delivery and agriculture. Its work covers multi-robot swarm systems, formation flight, onboard computer vision and AI, and cooperation between aerial and ground robots. Projects presented on its website include waterproof drones, autonomous UAV swarm formations, forest inspection, and research projects funded by the EU and Czech programmes, such as TACR SIGMA (autonomous air and ground robots) and TACR TREND (a multi-robot aerial system for autonomous surveillance and inspection).

The company's standard research platform is the F4F RoboFly, an autonomous research drone that runs open-source ROS software on Linux. It has a Raspberry Pi companion computer, a flight controller with an H7 32-bit processor, a distribution board with an IMU, and a GNSS/compass module compatible with GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou and QZSS. It supports forward- and down-facing cameras of up to 64 MP, a 4S 3700 mAh battery rated for up to 14 minutes of flight, a thrust-to-weight ratio of up to 4.0, 2- or 3-blade 5-inch propellers, USB and Ethernet expansion ports, vibration reduction, and simulator compatibility using Unreal Engine. The RoboFly Basic is sold through the company's online shop. The company also publishes a datasheet for the F4F RoboCore, a modular, fully autonomous aerial robot.

For security customers, Fly4Future offers autonomous surveillance and reconnaissance drones. These can fly pre-set routes or respond to alarms, run AI-based person detection, and operate alone or as a swarm alongside other UAVs and UGVs. They integrate Axis Communications cameras with on-camera video analytics, send metadata to video management systems, and carry speakers and lights to deter intruders. Target settings include critical infrastructure such as airports and prisons, traffic monitoring, and crowd management at events. The company's DroneBuilder is an online configurator that lets customers specify a custom drone, backed by free specialist consultation and a development and prototyping service.

Fly4Future won AI Company of the Year at the Czech AI Awards 2024, presented on 21 November 2024, from a field of 59 nominated companies. It also won the SPRIND Funke autonomous flight competition in Germany in 2024. The team has competed in the autonomous drone racing league near Abu Dhabi. The company publishes open-source software on GitHub under the fly4future organization.