Red Cat Holdings have completed a multi-drone autonomous flight test in partnership with Palladyne AI.
The recent autonomous flight test, featuring three diverse heterogeneous drones, marks a significant step forward in the active partnership between the two companies in testing the deployment of collaborative robotic systems for tactical UAV military operations.
This latest milestone builds on earlier test flights, including a dual-drone operation completed in January 2025 and a single-drone autonomous tracking test in December 2024. The recent test featured Red Cat’s Teal 2 and Black Widow™ drones, integrated with Palladyne’s Pilot AI™ software, operating collaboratively in real time. Each drone operated independently without reliance on centralized infrastructure, instead leveraging onboard edge processing and low-bandwidth communications to detect, identify, and track both dynamic and static targets—such as people and vehicles—across separate regions of interest. This approach delivered comprehensive situational awareness to a single operator through a distributed sensing model.
Geoff Hitchcock, Chief Revenue Officer of Red Cat, said, “Successfully expanding from single to three-drone operations reflects not only the reliability of our drones and Palladyne’s AI software, but also the capability of onboard systems to independently handle complex missions. For warfighters, this provides greater situational awareness while requiring fewer operators in the field to manage multiple assets. This latest test is a meaningful step toward making multiple, collaborative autonomous systems more practical and effective in real-world defense scenarios.”
The mission success reflects the growing synergy between Red Cat’s drone hardware—developed through subsidiaries Teal Drones and FlightWave Aerospace—and Palladyne’s AI software platform. Red Cat’s Family of Systems includes the Black Widow, awarded a Program of Record contract under the U.S. Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) program; TRICHON™, a fixed-wing VTOL platform; and FANG™, the first NDAA-compliant FPV drone optimized for military strike applications.
Matt Vogt, Palladyne AI Chief Revenue Officer, added, “This new testing milestone represents significant progress in our joint mission with Red Cat to enable multi-drone interoperability and autonomous collaboration for the defense sector. We are proud to have successfully completed this three-drone flight and believe our joint, cross-platform, autonomous solution will be a game changer for U.S. military personnel and drone operators. With this major step forward, we are excited about what Palladyne Pilot will bring to our government and defense customers as well as to our target non-defense civil customer base.”
Red Cat Holdings continues to position itself as a critical enabler of next-generation unmanned systems through its integration of robust drone platforms with intelligent software partners. As military needs evolve toward swarm and team-based drone operations, this collaboration signals practical progress in making those concepts operationally viable.
