Welcome to Action Space, Boston’s first anti-drone swarm defense hackathon (Oct 24–25, 2026). Hands-on, high-stakes, with hardware that actually flies.

The core challenge is counter-unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS): protect a high-value mock commercial target by detecting, tracking, and defeating an incoming hostile drone swarm. You aren't locked into pure drone-on-drone dogfights, if you want to, build a defender swarm, deploy tag-along interceptors with nets, or mix physical catch with policy loops. Whatever holds the airspace.

Day one is strictly simulation in Isaac Lab using PPO and multi-agent reinforcement learning and building. Day two, teams get live windows to run their software on a fleet of Tello drones and against them. Seats are limited by hardware access, food is provided, and more than $1,000 in prizes are up for grabs.

Apply and register directly on the Action Space Luma Page or check the main Action Space Website for details.

Requirements

Submission Requirements

To qualify for judging, your team must submit the following on Devpost before the 5:00 PM deadline on Sunday, Oct 25:

Working Repository: A public GitHub repository containing your Isaac Lab environment configs, agent policies, and flight control scripts.
Project Documentation: A brief README detailing your defense architecture (detect-track-defeat strategy, multi-agent stack, net intercept, or physical catch method).
1-Minute Video: A 60-second video showing your defensive stack operating in Isaac Lab sim and/or during your live hardware flight window on Day 2.
Live Demo: Pitch your system to judges during the table-to-table demo window.

Action Space

Prize breakdown

Timeline

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Requirements