In case you didn’t catch Secretary Hegseth’s State of the Force address yesterday, the US military is going all in on drones of all shapes and sizes, from big aircraft and boats all the way down to teeny-tiny air and ground vehicles.
And some people are taking teeny-tiny very seriously: Swarmbotics AI might make the smallest-but-mightiest ground vehicle out there.
This morning in an exclusive release to Tectonic, the Arizona-based startup unveiled the next generation of its fully autonomous, swarm-capable mini ground vehicle, FireAnt.
The new version has had a major glow-up—Swarmbotics added suspension so it can drive across all sorts of terrain, hardened it to the point that it can be left in rain, dust, and heat for weeks at a time, and added more processing power for its AI-powered swarming software to run locally.
We told you it was small-but-mighty.
Dark and swarmy: Swarmbotics AI has kept a low profile in public so far, but the startup has quietly carved a nice little niche for itself in the smallest form factor of autonomous ground vehicles.
- Most AGVs on the market are designed to carry heavier payloads, but Swarmbotics’ FireAnt weighs less than 100 pounds and measures just 30 inches long.
- With a flat bed, it can carry payloads ranging from a quadcopter drone to radars, ISR sensors, and even kinetics, including interceptors.
- Swarmbotics won the US Army’s xTech Overwatch last year, earning it a contract and integration into an Army Transformation in Contact (TiC) unit to accelerate the feedback and iteration loop. During a recent exercise with the 1st Cavalry Division, a handful of FireAnts were strapped to the side of a Bradley IFV and remotely deployed in a swarm.
Full auto: The company’s secret sauce—and what makes it different from most of the other UGVs, including the thousands used in Ukraine—is that it’s fully autonomous, not teleoperated. Swarmbotics developed its own camera-based autonomous navigation system and swarming software, and the upgraded FireAnt offers even more processing power.
- According to CEO Stephen Houghton, they haven’t “seen an upper-end limit yet in terms of how many you can control.”
Hardening the platform and sealing it to the elements while boosting processing power is easier said than done.
“For a bigger platform, that’s not hard at all; for a platform this size, we have a very hot computer, and essentially making it a sealed oven,” Swarmbotics co-founder and CTO Drew Watson told Tectonic. “Because of the way we’re doing AI at the edge, we’ve got a very, very powerful red-hot computer in there, so the IP rating was a big challenge. It’s a street fight between IP rating and thermal mitigation.”
That work is proving to be worth it.
“We’ve got such a breadth of demand across multiple units, multiple mission sets, payload providers, primes, and international [customers],” Houghton said. “It’s very clear that this form factor is highly desired.”
“We’re having a hard time keeping the robots in because we keep selling our test fleet because [the Army] wants them quickly, which is a great problem to have,” he added. “That means we’ve been shifting focus to manufacturing.”
