When you think of a drone swarm, a cloud of speedy little quadcopters flying in unison probably comes to mind. Swarm Aero has a different vision.
The California-based startup is building a much larger, Reaper-sized Group 5 drone, designed to be mass-manufacturable and capable of operating in a swarm using its own in-house autonomy and command-and-control (C2) software.
That new manufacturing approach—including the materials and processes—has caught the eye of the Air Force Research Lab, which awarded the startup a $10M R&D contract focused on high-rate composite manufacturing for aircraft parts, the company exclusively told Tectonic.
Ultimately, Swarm Aero sees that manufacturing research as a key step towards getting their big ‘ol drone in the air by next year, and swarms of them flying soon after.
“When we founded Swarm in 2022, we saw the future as large groups of autonomous aircraft cooperating together, sharing data, and really coordinating to achieve the same goals, so swarming—that’s where the name came from,” CEO Peter Kalogiannis told Tectonic. “We’re all used to seeing that at the Group 1, Group 2 level, but that scales up just as well to Group 5-size aircraft.”
Bigger buzz: The aircraft Swarm Aero’s developing is more or less designed to carry out the same kinds of missions as the MQ-9 Reaper—“from strike to ISR and others,” he added—but at a much more attractive price point and with mass-manufacturability built in from the start.
- It’s currently under development, and they’re “really deep in the process of turning this into flying aircraft,” Kalogiannis said, with the first flight slated for next year.
- They’ve also built the collaborative autonomy software (called Legion) to power swarms of the big drones themselves, which was tested on “Group 5 UAS to expendable platforms” during the US Navy’s 4th Fleet’s FLEX exercise earlier this summer.
- The aircraft development is backed by roughly $60M in venture capital funding spread across three rounds, including a $35M Series A in March.
Conveniently, this is pretty much what the DIU is looking for under the recently released Massed Modular Aircraft (MMA) solicitation, which is designed to find a lower-cost replacement for the workhorse (and super pricey) MQ-9 Reaper drones.
- The MMA requirements include a payload capacity of “at least” 2,800 pounds, a one-way range of 8,000 nautical miles, and a focus on payload and software modularity.
- The DIU wants that aircraft operational by 2031.
The $10M AFRL contract isn’t for Swarm Aero’s aircraft specifically, but rather for the material and manufacturing processes that lay the groundwork for building a large unmanned aircraft like theirs (and what the DIU’s seeking with the MMA) in large quantities and on a budget.
“In a lot of ways, it’s the continuation and expansion of the work we’ve been doing for our aircraft, but we think, more broadly, this aligns very well with what the DIU is looking to achieve with the MMA aircraft,” Kalogiannis said. “A focus on low cost and higher production rates.”
“Broadly, it’s looking at [R&D] for both the material and the process side for composite aerostructure manufacturing,” he added. “We’re certainly excited to partner with AFRL to drive that forward, with the goal of being able to deliver aircraft at a much lower cost than we have as a country to date.”
