PERSEUS — Trusted Autonomy for Contested Ground Operations

Praesidium Defence OÜ is an Estonian defence technology company developing PERSEUS, a trusted-autonomy decision architecture for unmanned ground systems. PERSEUS interprets the battlefield much as a trained soldier would: it reads terrain, identifies traversable and non-traversable ground, assesses exposure and concealment, weighs uncertainty and mission risk, and applies military doctrine and mission-specific TTPs to determine the most tactically appropriate course of action.

Rather than simply generating routes, PERSEUS provides the host vehicle with bounded, doctrine-aligned tactical behaviour and movement guidance such as whether to advance directly, use covered ground, bypass a risk area, reposition, hold, withdraw or escalate to the operator. The host platform retains responsibility for navigation execution, obstacle avoidance, low-level control and actuator commands.

Its trusted-autonomy approach is designed around explainability, accountability, traceability, operator oversight and clear safety boundaries. Each decision can be associated with the environmental inputs, mission context, constraints, candidate options, confidence levels and reasoning factors that produced it. This creates a replayable and auditable decision record, allowing operators, commanders, engineers and assurance authorities to reconstruct what PERSEUS knew, what alternatives it considered, why a recommendation was selected and which safety or doctrine constraints were applied.

PERSEUS integrates with existing vehicle navigation and control systems without directly commanding actuators, allowing the host platform to retain final safety and motion-control authority while preserving a clear separation of responsibility between perception, tactical reasoning and physical execution.