Another day, another pretty lethal-sounding mash-up.
Earlier this week, AI-powered machine gun turret startup Allen Control Systems announced that it’s officially teaming up with drone giant Red Cat as part of their Futures Initiative to build their Bullfrog platform onto Red Cat’s unmanned surface vessels (USVs).
Who said you can’t teach an old frog new tricks?
ACS CEO Mike Wior told Tectonic that the two teams have already completed the integration and are testing the unmanned gunboat on the water (though no live fire testing yet—pesky permissions).
“We’re very excited about the potential for a fully autonomous surface vessel [with] a fully autonomous payload, and what our war fighters can do with that type of combined platform,” he said.
Out at sea: You might be sitting there thinking—wait, doesn’t Red Cat make UAVs? And you’d be right, because that was their bread and butter until they unveiled their BlueOps unmanned maritime division last September.
- RedCat’s subsidiary Teal Drones builds Blue UAS-approved SRR and ISR drones.
- FlightWave Aerospace—the company’s other drone subsidiary—builds long-range, long-endurance VTOL drones.
- Both have been tapped for major US government contracts. Last year, Teal’s Black Widow drone was selected as part of the Army’s SRR Program of Record.
With Blue Ops, Red Cat has taken the same principle—build stuff that works for operators fast—and applied it to maritime.
- The subsidiary went from launch to boat in the water in about six months.
- Blue Ops kicked things off with a 7-meter USV with “five use cases: kinetic, SAM, UAV deployment, ISR, and machine gun,” Blue Ops lead Barry Hinckley told Tectonic last summer.
- They plan to build three (or four) more variants ranging from five to 11 meters.
I’m a warlord, b*tch: And it looks like they’ve found their machine gun provider in Texas-based ACS.
- The company’s flagship product is an autonomous gun tower called Bullfrog that uses AI and computer vision to identify, track, and target aerial threats—drones in particular.
- The system basically clocks a drone threat using computer vision, then swings around (up to 180 degrees) to take it down.
- ACS is already on contract with SOCOM for the turret and has demo’d for the Army.
You might think it would be pretty tricky to keep a machine gun turret stable on a USV like Blue Ops,’ but Wior said that’s actually where ACS shines with its “active stabilization technology”—a robotic control system that continuously corrects the aim of the weapon in real time.
“We’ve already integrated Bullfrog onto the bow of the variant seven USV,” he said. In tests on Lake Okeechobee, he added, “it has been performing very, very well.”
Prickly pear: So, what’s the use case for this kind of machine-gun-kitted-out drone boat?
“One of the big challenges that we’re hearing out of out of DoW is they’re losing up to half of the USVs that they’re sending out on missions to group one and group two drones,” Wior said. “USVs being able to poke back at helicopters [and drones] in a meaningful way makes these USVs a lot more prickly than they are today.”
Basically, the more effectively a USV is able to defend itself, the fewer you have to send out to accomplish a mission, he added.
And it doesn’t sound like the partnership is going to stop there. “They’re looking at building a suite of USVs, we are looking at building a suite of modular payloads,” Wior said. “What we’re really trying to do is empower the customer and the warfighter to purposely configure their systems for the mission that they’re trying to go on.”