The Vertex Swarm Challenge 2026
Coordinating Robots, Drones, and IoT Fleets Beyond the Cloud
About
The Vertex Swarm Challenge 2026 is a global engineering challenge for C, Rust, and ROS 2 developers, researchers, and system architects who care about how autonomous systems coordinate in the real world — not just how a single robot moves in a perfect lab. True autonomy requires machines talking directly to machines. Using Vertex 2.0, the missing TCP/IP for robot swarms, you will build peer-to-peer coordination layers that make fast, local, multi-party decisions without relying on a single orchestrator or vendor middleware. Coordinate: Make drones and robots from different vendors discover each other, share state, and cooperate as one swarm. Automate: Run AMRs and warehouse fleets that negotiate routes, hand off tasks, and recover gracefully when one unit misbehaves. Secure: Design safety-critical behaviors where a single fault signal can propagate through the mesh and freeze an entire fleet in milliseconds.
This hackathon has ended