Mary-Louise Hoffman
The Navy has awarded RDRTec a $3 million contract to develop a radar technology that would allow drones to sense and avoid other aircraft in airspace, Military & Aerospace Electronics reported Thursday.
John Keller writes that RDRTech will build an autonomous collision avoidance system for the Navy’s fleet of MQ-8 Fire Scout and MQ-4C Triton unmanned aerial vehicles.
The company won the contract through the Office of Naval Research’s Rapid Innovation Fund initiative, according to Keller.
Keller reports the contract is meant to support drones’ future integration into domestic airspace.
RDRTech has built a Fire Scout UAV sense-and-avoid system under a separate Navy program by using active phased array and signal processing technologies.
