Red Cat, offering through its fully owned subsidiary TEAL the BLACK WIDOW drone, has been selected to supply the U.S. Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR), after getting the approval of the Army Project Management Office for Uncrewed Aircraft Systems, Army Maneuver Battle Lab, Army Test and Evaluation Command, and Army Operational Test Center during the trials.
The SRR project has a current acquisition objective of 5,880 systems, each of which consists of 2 drones, although the exact numbers to be acquired will be decided at various contract award points over the coming years. This is a very significant win for Red Cat and Teal which will enable their continued growth.
The BLACK WIDOW drone, fully backpackable and modular, comes with significant operational capabilities ensured by the cooperation of Teal with other firms: in particular, the drone incorporates Teledyne FLIR’s HADRON 640R+ longwave infrared and mega-pixel visible camera module and its PRISM AI embedded perception software. The HADRON is very thermal sensitive camera and offers a 64MP resolution in visible imaging, with PRISM AI software embedded to ensure advanced object detection and tracking.
BLACK WIDOW has proven resistant to jamming and able to achieve reliable connectivity thanks to Doodle Labs’s Helix Mesh Rider Radio as its resilient on-board datalink. Teal has also been working with Athena AI to give their drones a superior automated ability to detect, classify, battle track and send reports over to ATAK soldier-worn user devices. This has been done in cooperation with the US and Australian militaries.
Teal’s TEAL 2 drone, predecessor to BLACK WIDOW, has also been tested earlier this year in the UK by 700X Naval Air Squadron BLACK WIDOW weighs just 3.6 lbs (1.63 kg) and offers a flight time of circa 35 minutes and beyond depending on conditions and configuration. It moves at a speed of 10 meters per second (23 mph) with a range of around 5 miles (8 km) SKyDio had been the incumbent and is, in general, a big player in the drone arena. Its RQ-28A quadcopter had been picked for the 1st tranche of the SRR program and was first delivered in 2022.
The SRR is intended as Platoon-level solution. The US Army is also procuring Soldier Borne Sensor, represented so far primarily by the Teledyne Flir’s Black Hornet 3 at Squad level.
For Company-level, the US Army has recently picked the Ghost X from Anduril Industries and the C-100 from Performance Drone Works, and work is ongoing to field a Future Tactical Uncrewed Aircraft System (FTUAS) aligned with brigades while concept development is underway for reconnaissance at higher echelons, including to complement and eventually possibly replace the MQ-1C GRAY EAGLE.
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