Red Cat Holdings has announced a new collaboration with Safe Pro Group to integrate an AI-powered image analysis technology into its Black Widow™ drones.
The integration is designed to help U.S. and allied ground personnel quickly identify and locate over 150 types of explosive threats in real-time, including landmines, anti-personnel mines, cluster munitions, and unexploded ordnance.
The technology, known as Safe Pro’s Object Threat Detection (SPOTD) system, will process real-time 4K video directly onboard the Black Widow ISR drone at the tactical edge. This live threat data can then be delivered to military situational awareness platforms, such as the U.S. Army’s Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK) software ecosystem, to enhance and accelerate decision-making.
The Black Widow drone will also integrate with Safe Pro’s new SPOTD Navigation, Observation and Detection Engine (NODE). This powerful, edge-based solution is designed to process, map, and share critical information collected by drones, enabling users to collect visual data, receive threat alerts, and use that imagery to create 2D and 3D interactive maps that plot hazard detections. This capability is intended to provide enhanced situational awareness for ground missions, even in environments where connectivity is unavailable.
According to the companies, the SPOTD technology is powered by a real-world dataset of landmines and unexploded ordnance. This dataset consists of high-resolution imagery and GPS-tagged geospatial data from Ukraine, which includes over 1.88 million drone images analyzed to date and more than 34,200 threats identified across 8,119 hectares.
“The Black Widow continues to distinguish itself as a leading sUAS platform for defense and security, ideally suited to supporting the evolving needs of the U.S. Army and its global allies,” said Jeff Thompson, Red Cat CEO. “By incorporating field-proven innovations such as Safe Pro’s unique AI-powered threat detection technology, we continue to redefine the future of force protection and battlefield awareness.”
Dan Erdberg, Chairman and CEO of Safe Pro Group Inc., added, “As demonstrated in Ukraine, the battlefield is dramatically evolving, establishing a critical need to provide today’s warfighter with access to enhanced, real-time situational awareness. By harnessing the power of the Black Widow with Safe Pro’s battle-tested threat detection technology, we have created a platform that can uniquely support the needs of the U.S. Army for real-time battlefield intelligence, and we look forward to bringing this capability to our warfighters.”
