It’s been quite the week for AeroVironment (now officially called AV). Hot on the heels of finalizing their $4.1B BlueHalo acquisition, the defense-company-formerly-known-as-a-drone-company unveiled two new products at SOFWeek: Red Dragon, a one-way attack drone, and Titan 4, an upgraded cUAS system.
All jammed up: Red Dragon—which looks a bit like a torpedo with wings and a tail—was designed specifically to operate in contested environments, where jamming and other forms of electronic warfare (EW) are all over the place. According to AV, the drone is fully autonomous—it can carry out “mission objectives” (read: attacks) without operator input or satellite navigation.
Jeff Rodrian, EVP at AV’s MacCready Works lab, told Tectonic that the drone has already been tested extensively—including in Ukraine—and that it “performed very well” even in fully denied environments.
“The product’s actually quite mature,” he said, “We’ve been testing it extensively in different areas around the world to challenge and exercise the system in battlefield-like conditions.” Red Dragon:
- Has a 200km range.
- Is about six feet long and can carry a payload of up to 22 pounds (10 kilograms).
- Uses AV’s SpotrEdge, an AI-powered targeting system.
- Runs on AV’s AVACORE software architecture, but Rodrian and AV program director Mike Bigney told us it was built using open architecture protocols. They are open to working with other C2 systems (like, for example, Anduril’s Lattice).
- Is designed to be produced quickly, and at scale. The company has also ensured that the software is quick and easy to update—in places like Ukraine, that’s critical.
Rodrian couldn’t disclose who’s bought Red Dragon just yet but said they’ve already got a production line going and have been producing the drones for the past few months. He said that the military had been “very receptive” to the new drone.
Pew-pew: Guess it makes sense that the people building the drones would also be the ones building the systems to blast them out of the sky. Alongside Red Dragon, AV also unveiled Titan 4, a new, smaller version of the company’s Titan cUAS system. (Titan was originally produced by BlueHalo.)
- Titan is a high-powered radio-frequency cUAS system that uses AI to detect and intercept drone threats.
- It’s designed to be highly mobile and deployed quickly—it comes in both man-portable and vehicle-mounted versions.
- Titan 4 is a “smaller, lighter, more powerful” version of its predecessors—it’s 17% lighter, 73% smaller, and 250% more powerful than before, according to AV.
- Sean Troyer, SVP of RF C-UAS strategic operations at AV, told Tectonic that the system also has more channels and more extensibility, meaning it can be updated and adapted to meet changing battlefield needs
- BlueHalo was awarded a $27M DoD contract for Titan in 2022, and Troyer said that thousands of the systems have already been deployed around the world.
Titan-4 is “not in the wild as of yet,” Troyer said, but the company plans to start low-rate production in the next few months and ramp up to full production by the end of the year. The Army has already placed a purchase order for the new system, he said, and he expects the first delivery to be in August.