U.S. defence start-up Anduril announced two new First-Person-View drones in October. The company unveiled the Bolt and Bolt M man-packable, vertical take-off and landing, autonomous air vehicles.
The basic model, the Bolt is intended for Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance in addition to search and rescue. The Bolt-M is the munition model of the FPV drone.
The company advertises the new drone as something that simplifies operation by only requiring operators to decide where to look, what to follow, how to engage and when to strike, without requiring highly specialised training.
The Bolt VTOL drone does not require any dedicated launch equipment and can operate from congested environments. It can be unpacked and airborne in under five minutes and loaded with a range of anti-personnel and anti-materiel warheads.
An onboard camera can switch between electro-optic and infrared modes to allow day and night operations.
With an endurance of 40 minutes and a range of 20 kilometres the Bolt-M features ‘autonomous waypoint navigation and target-agnostic object tracking’ with a three-pound munition payload capacity. It can be deployed against static or moving ground-based targets that include light vehicles, dismounted personnel and trenches.
Advanced onboard Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning software onboard the Bolt automates flight behaviours required to find, track and strike dynamic targets. Operators can draw a bounding box around any visual target for Bolt-M to follow and specify a stand-off position to maintain, and then stalk the target from beyond visual or acoustic detection range even if the target moves and is not clearly visible. An operator can set the most efficient engagement angle to and onboard vision and guidance algorithms maintain terminal guidance even if connectivity is lost with the operator.
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