The great American leap across the pond continues.
This morning, autonomy giant (and dual-use stan) Applied Intuition announced that it has officially been awarded a UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) Defence and Science Technology Laboratory (DSTL) to “deliver a complete autonomy test bed for ground-launched, near-surface drone swarms.”
Applied will lead a consortium of companies—Rowden Technologies, Evolve Dynamics, SAIF Autonomy, Frazer-Nash Consultancy—in building the drone swarms, which UK Head Iain Lamont said will be demo’d before April. The company did not reveal the value of the contract.
“This represents a really exciting entry for Applied Intuition into the UK,” Lamont said. “[We are] building a sovereign capability in the UK with UK engineers and a UK stack that we will then exploit across various other projects in the MOD and with our partners and allies in Europe.”
Told you guys—sovereignty really is so hot right now.
No hands: First, a refresher on Applied Intuition. The company was founded in 2017 and initially focused on commercial vehicle autonomy, but in the past few years has doubled down on defense.
- The company builds both testing and development software for autonomous systems, as well as the autonomy software itself (since acquiring EpiSci last year).
- They’ve scored some huge contracts in the US, including a $171M deal with the CDAO to build the DoD’s all-domain autonomy development and testing platform.
- And they’ve also raised a heck-ton of cash—last summer, the company raised a cool $600M at a $15B valuation.
Applied Intuition officially launched in the UK last May and teamed up with UK USV company (and defense tech darling) Kraken in September.
Dexter’s laboratory: Now if you’re sitting there thinking, “What the heck is DSTL,” bless you. You’re not in too deep yet.
DSTL is basically like the UK MoD’s funhouse laboratory—the Bond movie-like unit that is charged with spinning out cutting-edge tech for UK defense and security.
- The unit has been working on drone swarms for a while—they’ve contracted companies like Blue Bear Systems Research and SeeByte to build aerial and multi-domain drone systems.
- The idea is that DSTL (kind of like DARPA in the US) works on tech the military needs, then it gets spun out across the rest of the MoD if it works and operators like it.
“This is a really exciting project [for Applied Intuition] because it’s for DSTL, but…they have a very clear sponsor in Army headquarters and a path to [get] this into the hands of the end users in the field army,” Lamont said.
Easter egg hunt: The contract was officially awarded before Christmas, Lamont told us, and the team started integrating (with a little help from Rowden) Applied’s software onto Evolve’s WOLFE-NATO drones in January.
“We managed to…conduct flight trials before the end of January,” he added. “We were really proud of that kind of timeline. What it does is demonstrate to us how quickly you can use software in the loop, hardware in the loop testing before you go to live flight testing.”
The full demo will be conducted before Easter, he said.
By land or by sea: For now, Lamont said, the contract is focused on aerial drones. But Applied’s software can make things autonomous at sea and on land, too. So, once things are validated, they could start going multi-domain.
“In time, there is no reason that we can’t incorporate other systems—both larger air systems,
and ground systems—into this architecture,” he said.