Red Cat Holdings has selected Teledyne FLIR to provide thermal imaging and artificial intelligence embedded software for its Black Widow small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS).
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. Black Widow’s fully modular architecture enables swift adaptation to diverse mission requirements, including SSR and secondary payload operation.
Red Cat was selected as the winner of the US Army’s Short-Range Reconnaissance Program of Record (SSR) after an evaluation process. The US Army’s current acquisition objective is for 5,880 systems, with each system consisting of two aircraft.
“We are proud to be selected by Red Cat to support the Black Widow with tactical capabilities for the U.S. Army’s SSR Program,” said Teledyne VP Paul Clayton. “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 Hadron 640R+, with its best-in-class thermal vision, will play a key role in helping the warfighter,” said Red Cat CTO George Matus. “We are thrilled to continue our longstanding relationship with the world leader in thermal imaging technology, enabling Red Cat to accelerate deployment to the US DoD and its allies across the globe.”
The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR)-free Hadron 640R+ provides a 640×512-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.
