Through this agreement, Apium joins the Red Cat Futures Initiative, an industry-wide robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) consortium dedicated to putting the most advanced and interoperable uncrewed aircraft systems into the hands of warfighters.
The announcement follows successful integration of Apium’s technology onto Red Cat’s Teal 2 drone enabling the drones to autonomously perform multi-agent missions at the Army’s ACM-UAS Industry Day at Fort Rucker, Alabama. The demonstration showcased the value of decentralized, scalable drone swarming for modern military operations.
“One to Many swarming is the future of autonomous warfare,” said Tyler MacCready, Founder and Chief Scientist at Apium. “However, there needs to be a balance between autonomy and operator accessibility to ensure effectiveness. Our technology allows full swarm capability to be added to existing ‘off the shelf’ multi-domain UxS enabling a single operator to launch, command, and adapt swarms in real time without complex pre-mission planning or centralized control. Partnering with Red Cat and joining the Futures Initiative enables us to deliver that capability at the tactical edge.”
Enabling Tactical Swarms at Scale
Apium’s system scalability is a result of moving the swarm logic from a centralized ground station to the drone itself. This allows each drone to make independent decisions through cooperation with neighboring vehicles without requiring a constant up-link or ground control. This architecture eliminates single points of failure, allowing the swarm to continue to operate even when vehicles fail or ground station communications are lost. The system has also demonstrated resiliency when degraded by jamming or interference.
Operators can engage any of the variety of behaviors found in Apium’s Swarm Library with just a few taps on a touch screen interface. These behaviors range in complexity from orbiting over a target, to fully automated collaborative sorties. Behaviors may be changed or adjusted, at any time, even after the swarm has been launched. Vehicles may join or leave the swarm mid-mission, allowing vehicles to be temporarily reassigned for direct individual control, sensor ops, or kinetic action and later reintegrate with the swarm seamlessly.
“Apium’s system brings distributed drone swarming out of the lab and onto the battlefield,” said Jason Gunter, Director of Special Programs at Red Cat and head of the Futures Initiative. “They’ve proven that you can run adaptive, resilient swarming behaviors with minimal operator burden and without constant connectivity or centralized control. This is a major leap forward for tactical autonomy and the exact capability our warfighters need in complex, contested environments.”
Scaling Autonomy for Complex Operational Environments
The Futures Initiative is a strategic collaboration aimed to fast-track the deployment of autonomous systems across air, land, and sea. It connects Red Cat with industry innovators in AI and computer vision applications, 3D mapping, target acquisition, swarming, and other sUAS decision support features. The program also supports broader national efforts such as the DoD’s priority to rapidly field attritable, autonomous platforms.
By joining the Futures Initiative, Apium will collaborate with Red Cat to integrate its swarm-enabled platform across Red Cat’s entire Family of Systems, led by the Black Widow™. Apium’s technology is also autopilot-agnostic, compatible with PX4, ArduPilot, and other common systems, enabling rapid integration across both current and future unmanned assets.
