Don’t you worry: prime-startup-cuffing season is still in full swing.
Earlier this week, L3Harris inked a deal with Shield AI to integrate the autonomy-big-dawg’s Tracker Counter-UAS, which has AI-and-computer-vision-powered software for drone detection and tracking, across Shield AI’s VAMPIRE c-UAS platform. It’s the first time Shield AI has licensed the software to another company.
Maybe getting out from under Mad Men-era executive leadership was enough to bring L3Harris into the new age of defense tech…just sayin’.
Rolled the dice on that one—onto the tech.
Twilight: L3Harris’ Vehicle Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (we’ll stick with VAMPIRE to avoid word-salad-induced headaches) combines an EO/IR stabilized targeting-and-sensor system with APKWS laser-guided rockets (or other low-cost guided munitions) to shoot down drones.
- VAMPIRE, FWIW, is pretty combat-tested and well into high-rate production. It’s been deployed in Ukraine since 2023 and has since logged over 350,000 operational hours there.
It’s typically truckbed-mounted, but it comes in a few variants for all of your fancier drone-downing needs:
- Stalker XR (light land vehicle-mounted);
- Black Wake (unmanned surface vessel-mounted);
- Dead Wing (deployed from helicopters or aircraft while in flight);
- CASKET (VAMPIRE-in-a-box); and, last but not least;
- BAT (a fixed-site turret for installation security).
Notably, the deal with Shield AI comes a few months after L3Harris was awarded an Army contract, valued at up to $106M, for VAMPIRE to support “urgent defense against hostile drones.”
And this isn’t an experimental partnership, either. “Tracker C-UAS has been fielded with VAMPIRE,” a Shield AI spokesperson told Tectonic, and “the plan is for Tracker C-UAS to be integrated with all future VAMPIRE deliveries.”
Here’s what the prime (and its customers) are getting in this deal:
- Tracker C-UAS uses Shield AI’s AI-and-computer-vision software to “detect, discriminate, and track” drones in EO/IR video.
- It’s “designed to detect drones of all classes with automated detection boxes…by recognizing drones amongst airborne detections with a minimum of 2×2 pixels, to provide a binary classification (drone vs. not-drone), and visually filtering out airborne clutter such as birds and weather artifacts,” the spokesperson said.
- As the name might indicate, Tracker C-UAS also provides tracking capabilities, “which aids C-UAS systems with targeting and effector-cueing,” the Shield AI spokesperson added. “The autonomy we currently enable on VAMPIRE is the early, autonomous detection of faraway threats—threats that are so small the operator sometimes struggles to spot until they are closer.”
The deal with L3Harris is the first time Shield AI has publicly licensed the software to another company—publicly being the operative word.
“Additional integrations are in progress, but we don’t have approval yet to discuss work still underway,” Shield AI’s spokesperson said. “VAMPIRE is the one we can speak to today, and that’s where our focus is.”
By the way, this is the same Shield AI that’s building a 26-foot-long autonomous fighter jet. Always good to have a few revenue streams.
