SALT LAKE CITY - Palladyne AI and Ukrainian-Estonian defense technology company NORDA Dynamics plan to integrate Palladyne AI's SwarmOS collaborative autonomy software with NORDA's Underdog Autonomy Module to combine multi-aircraft coordination with autonomous terminal guidance.

The companies announced the collaboration, saying they plan to integrate the two systems onto one or more uncrewed platforms and demonstrate the combined capability, subject to necessary government approvals. The companies have not announced a platform or schedule for the demonstration.

SwarmOS is designed to provide distributed perception and coordination among multiple uncrewed platforms. Palladyne AI says the software enables aircraft to detect, classify, and track multiple targets and coordinate assignments without relying on a centralized control architecture. The company demonstrated SwarmOS during the U.S. Army's Project Convergence Capstone 6 exercise in July and August, where it reported multi-drone, multi-vendor autonomous operations.

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Underdog autonomy

NORDA's Underdog is an autonomy module designed to provide terminal guidance for uncrewed aircraft. NORDA says its Underdog CORE architecture supports navigation without global navigation satellite system signals, target recognition, terminal guidance and onboard decision-making. Independent reporting on the Ukrainian company's technology describes Underdog as a universal autonomy module that can be integrated with multiple types of uncrewed aircraft and used when GPS or communications links are disrupted.

Under the planned integration, SwarmOS would provide the distributed sensing, target tracking and coordination layer, while Underdog would handle terminal guidance after an individual aircraft is assigned a target. The companies say SwarmOS could pass target-state information to Underdog, allowing multiple aircraft to pursue assigned targets while reducing reliance on continuous communications with an operator.

The companies are also positioning the combined architecture for counter-uncrewed-aircraft-system missions. They say multiple aircraft could coordinate sensing, tracking, and interception while using onboard processing and distributed decision-making to continue operating when communications are degraded or denied.

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Solving problems

The proposed integration addresses two different autonomy problems. Swarm coordination requires multiple aircraft to maintain a shared understanding of targets and determine how to task individual platforms. Terminal guidance requires an individual aircraft to continue tracking and pursuing an assigned target when external navigation or communications capabilities may be unavailable.

NORDA says its autonomy technology is used by more than 200 units within Ukraine's Defense Forces and that its Underdog 0.8 terminal-guidance update achieved 93% mission effectiveness based on an analysis of more than 1,000 combat mission reports. Those figures are company-reported.

The companies have not disclosed the specific uncrewed platforms, sensor interfaces, communications architecture, or target-state data formats they would use to connect SwarmOS and Underdog. The companies also have not publicly demonstrated the combined system.