Drone technology from UASFeed — autonomy, swarming, sensors, counter-jamming, FPV builds, and the engineering underneath uncrewed flight.
Shield AI says its first full-scale X-BAT tail-sitting jet drone rolls out by the end of October, with $400M now behind the program and a Navy early-capability target of 2029. The engine, nozzle and launch system it depends on still have to be proven.
Read the story →ideaForge's new ZOLT Hybrid claims more than 6 hours of endurance and 100 km line-of-sight range, and a battery-powered ZOLT UCAV joins it. The baseline drone already flies with the Indian Army, but it is not clear which variants the Army is receiving.
Ukraine's 93rd Brigade drove an amphibious ground robot 40 km across land and water to resupply troops in a sector where rivers block ordinary robots. Operators steered it by hand the whole way, and it came through Russian fire. Brave1 calls it the first logistics mission of its kind.
Ukrainian intelligence says Russia now builds more jet-powered Geran-4/5 drones each month than the original piston Geran-2/Shahed-136 — and the new variant's 600km/h top speed is outrunning Ukraine's existing interceptors.
Boston startup MagLev Aero landed simultaneous DARPA MVP and Embedded Entrepreneur Initiative awards on Sept. 25 to push its magnetically levitated ducted-fan propulsion toward a TRL-6 flight demo.
Norwegian airborne-wind-energy firm Kitemill showed Kitewall at DroneX London: a tethered VTOL kite that it says generates 15 kW from tether pull, lifts 20 kg to 500 m and can detach for untethered patrols. All figures are company claims.
Ukraine's dismissed defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, launched an 'Army of Robots' in Lviv, promising a humanoid-like robot battlefield result in six months and a no-infantry assault in a year, though most designs shown are still concept art.
A teardown of a nearly intact jet-powered Geran-4 shows Russia's newest Shahed variant leans on a Chinese TJ-2000-class turbojet, a Chinese mesh modem and Texas Instruments parts, with the engine the hardest piece to replace.
A DHS lab's Blue UAS comparative assessment found three of five approved drones could not hold position at Hudson Yards, with link losses 50 feet from launch. Skydio's X10D scored highest, and Chinese drone results were withheld.
DARPA has confirmed a second Lift Challenge for summer 2028 that doubles the minimum payload to 220 lbs and the course to 10 nautical miles, raising the bar after AVIDrone's 3.84:1 payload-to-weight finish this August.
A Skoltech paper posted to arXiv introduces AgenticSwarm, an LLM-driven system that turns natural-language orders into coordinated multi-drone missions and replans automatically when a UAV fails or its battery degrades.
Dstl says Phase 1 of its Software Defined Swarms demonstrator produced an eight-drone test bed the British Army has already flown for eight weeks, built from two rival industry options, Saab's BlueBear and an Applied Intuition-led consortium, with no head-to-head results released.
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