Red Cat Holdings has selected Teledyne FLIR to provide thermal imaging and artificial intelligence embedded software for its Black Widow small unmanned aircraft system.
Red Cat was selected as the winner of the US Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) Program of Record after an evaluation process completed by the Army Project Management Office for an uncrewed aircraft system. The US Army’s current acquisition objective is for 5,880 systems, with each system consisting of two aircraft.
Red Cat incorporated Teledyne FLIR’s NDAA-compliant Hadron 640R+ longwave infrared and mega-pixel visible camera module and its Prism AI embedded perception software into Black Widow – a highly capable, rucksack-portable sUAS designed for operation in electronic warfare environments.
“We are proud to be selected by Red Cat to support the Black Widow with unparalleled tactical capabilities for the US Army’s SSR Program,” said Paul Clayton, Vice President at Teledyne FLIR. “This collaboration provides the Black Widow with superior yet compact dual thermal-visible imaging along with AI software libraries that enable classification, object detection, and object tracking to complete the mission day or night.”
The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR)-free Hadron 640R+ provides a 640 x 512-resolution thermal camera with industry-leading thermal sensitivity and a 64-MP resolution visible camera in a size, weight, and power-optimised package. Paired with Prism AI embedded software, the combination can enable high-precision object detection within application-specific classes, multiple object tracking, motion target indication, and more.
