First person view combat drone developed by Ukraine’s Grim Tech. (Photo: Grim Tech)
The Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program (DDP) on July 1 said it invited 19 companies to compete in the final stage of its second challenge round in August with a chance to win production orders worth a combined $300 million.
The companies invited to compete at Fort Carson, Colo., are Ascent Aerosystems, Auterion Government Solutions, Griffon Aerospace, Grim Tech, Hyperscale, ModalAI, a team of Mountain Horse Solutions and AG3 Labs, Neros Technologies, ORQA US LLC, Perennial Autonomy, Renegade UxS, Skycutter, Stellarion, Swarm Defense, Teal Drones, Ukrainian Defense Drones (UDD), Vector, Wilcox Cherry Defense and XTEND Reality.
Each company has about five weeks to deliver 120 drones with lethality payloads for the Gauntlett II final challenge. The drone vendors are paired with at least one of five previously selected lethality providers, which are Bravo Ordnance, Kela Defense US Inc., Kraken Kinetics, Mountain Horse LLC and Northrop Grumman [NOC] SUkrystems Corp.
The 19 finalists were whittled down from 49 companies that competed in June at a qualifier at Camp Grayling, Mich. For that event, the companies provided about 79 unique drone systems to compete in one or two mission areas, long range strike and tactical assault in close quarters.
At Fort Carson, the drones will be put through operational testing in the mission relevant scenarios that occur in contested electromagnetic environments.
A Request for Solutions for Gauntlet II in April said the top performer in each mission area will receive an order for 8,000 prototype drones, second place 7,000, third place 6,000, fourth place 5,000 and fifth place 4,000.
In March, the DDP selected 11 top performers from Gauntlet I at Fort Benning, Ga. Among those winners, Skycutter, ModalAI, Auterion, UDD, Ascent Aerosystems and Griffon Aerospace are in the hunt for Gauntlet II orders.
Neros, which finished second in Gauntlet I, has completed deliveries and acceptance of its 2,400 drones contracted by DDP, according to the DDP’s website. As of June 18, the DDP has accepted 80 of Ascent’s drones against a production order for 1,600, DDP says.
Most of the other companies selected for Gauntlet 1 prototype orders have either begun to ship their drones or are ramping production. Only Skycutter, which won Gauntlet I, and Napatree, the third place finisher, are listed as neither ramping nor shipping their drones yet, DDP says.
The aim of the DDP is help create a domestic industrial base for small, relatively inexpensive and attritable drones produced in massive numbers that the Defense Department can draw on. Some of the competitors are not based in the U.S., such as Britain’s Skycutter and Ukraine’s Grim. UDD represents Ukraine’s F-Drones and is establishing a manufacturing facility in Northwest Ohio.
A version of this story originally appeared in sister publication Defense Daily.
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