Prague couple building AI drone swarms that understand speech

Fly4Future, a Prague-based family company run by Vera and Martin Saska, is developing fully autonomous drone swarms capable of rescuing people and replacing warehouse workers — and it has already caught the attention of Germany’s major innovation agency Sprind, winning its prestigious competition.

Imagine a drone that needs just one sentence: “Find the person in a red T-shirt lying by the building near the trees.” Without a single button being pressed by a human, it takes off, builds its own map of the terrain, analyses the data, locates the casualty and lands safely at a distance so its spinning blades don’t hurt them. This isn’t a scene from a sci-fi film but real technology, developed by a Czech team of around forty engineers and developers.

“We don’t make ordinary, dumb drones. We build flying autonomous robots with artificial intelligence right on board,” explains Vera Sasková. Unlike conventional aircraft flown by a pilot with a remote control, Fly4Future’s systems operate with a high degree of independence.

The company is already testing a feature that lets you give a drone a command in plain human language — for example, “Land next to the red car” — and it will find the right vehicle itself and complete the task. “The large language models in our system take over the role of the robotics engineer, who used to have to manually translate a customer’s wishes into program code,” adds Martin Saska, a robotics expert. At the same time, he stresses that actually controlling a drone’s flight and movement in space still requires serious engineering expertise. “Almost anyone can write a simple simulation with AI today, but getting a real robot to work reliably in the physical world is a far more demanding discipline. So I don’t think we scientists will be out of a job just yet,” he jokes.

The couple believe the real “next big thing” in the industry is robotic drone swarms. Demand for them is growing rapidly around the world. Like a flock of birds, such a swarm can communicate among its members, distribute tasks and react to changing conditions without centralised control — and its applications go far beyond rescue operations.

The Saskas also see huge potential in industry. “We already have several deployments in real robotic warehouses, where our autonomous systems fly around, help out and can replace, for example, warehouse workers,” says Vera Sasková.

Demand for “smart” flying hardware from Prague is growing faster than current production capacity allows, so the couple have decided to bring in investors to expand manufacturing. At the same time, they intend to build their swarm robotics system entirely on a proven European supply chain — without relying on Asia or the United States.

By the Around Prague newsroom