November 24, 2025
Project RISE
Integration of UTM services directly with onboard drone flight controllers.
Selection into the NATO Defence Innovation Accelerator (DIANA) 2026 Programme to advance resilient, secure edge communication and autonomous coordination in contested environments.
Neuron was selected from over 3,600 global applicants to join the NATO DIANA 2026 Challenge Programme under the Secure Edge Infrastructure for Autonomous Communication and AI Coordination challenge. The project focuses on hardening and adapting the 4DSKY / Neuron stack for Degraded, Denied, Intermittent and Limited (DDIL) environments — where GPS, connectivity or central infrastructure cannot be relied upon. The system enables autonomous sensors, radios, drones and edge devices to discover, coordinate and exchange data securely without central servers, using an edge-native, peer-to-peer architecture proven in live aviation surveillance deployments.
NATO DIANA.
Successful entry into the DIANA Accelerator (Core) Programme, validating Neuron’s architecture against military-grade latency, resilience and security requirements. The selection positions Neuron and 4DSKY as a strategic dual-use platform for secure edge communication, autonomous coordination and resilient sensing across defence and civil domains.
Defence & Security
Resilient, infrastructure-independent communication for ISR coordination, autonomous systems, coalition operations and multi-agent missions in contested environments.
Civil & Critical Infrastructure
Enhanced airspace safety, surveillance and situational awareness during GPS jamming, network outages or infrastructure failure, improving resilience for safety-critical operations.
Masterless Architecture for DDIL Operations
At the core of Neuron and 4DSKY is a masterless, decentralised architecture designed for environments where central servers are unavailable or compromised. Processing and coordination occur at the edge, directly on sensors and nodes. If individual nodes are lost, the network continues to operate — enabling swarm-level resilience aligned with modern defence doctrine and coalition operations.
Autonomous Discovery & Policy-Enforced Coordination
Neuron combines a secure edge orchestration layer with a programmable application layer (Node Builder & SDK), enabling policy-enforced discovery, secure coordination and rapid mission-logic deployment across heterogeneous devices — from sensors and radios to drones and autonomous agents.
Dual-Use Validation via NATO DIANA
Participation in DIANA serves as a quality and robustness benchmark. Technologies capable of operating in contested military environments inherently raise the reliability bar for commercial aviation, logistics and civil surveillance, differentiating 4DSKY from consumer-grade tracking and centralised monitoring solutions.
Acceleration of 4DSKY Capabilities
DIANA-driven development directly strengthens 4DSKY’s multi-sensor fusion, peer-to-peer data exchange and resilience under degraded connectivity, increasing assurance for safety-critical airspace and situational-awareness workflows.
Why Hedera matters
Distributed, decentralised systems must couple resilient networking with verifiable data integrity and scalable consensus. Hedera (the Hedera public ledger) is important in this context because it provides a high-throughput, low-latency consensus layer with strong finality and a governance model designed for enterprise reliability. For architectures that require tamper-evident audit trails, cryptographic proofs of state and efficient tokenisation of identities or policies, Hedera offers an enterprise-grade ledger with predictable performance and low energy cost. This makes Hedera an attractive building block for projects that combine peer-to-peer coordination with auditable, distributed records — for both trusted coalition operations and accountable dual-use deployments.
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