PHOENIX - Honeywell Aerospace and Shield AI completed two autonomous flight demonstrations, culminating in a coordinated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) mission in which two aircraft shared target information, divided mission tasks, and autonomously executed their assigned actions.
The demonstrations used Shield AI's Hivemind Enterprise autonomy platform, which provides software and development tools for building, testing, deploying, and operating autonomous systems. Honeywell Aerospace engineers began training on the platform in late April and, about six weeks later, flew a Honeywell-owned BFD-SE8 multirotor aircraft autonomously for the first time in mid-June.
During an official demonstration on 8 July in Plymouth, Minn., the aircraft took off autonomously, followed a planned route, rerouted around a no-fly zone, and returned to base. The flight demonstrated autonomous navigation and mission execution, laying the groundwork for the more complex, multi-aircraft operation that followed.
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Second demo details
For the second demonstration, conducted near Phoenix on 8 Oct., Honeywell engineers integrated their own artificial intelligence model for target detection and tracking with Hivemind. The two aircraft also carried Honeywell Aerospace's o480 inertial navigation system.
During the mission, a scout aircraft used onboard cameras and Honeywell's AI model to detect, identify, and track a target. Hivemind passed the target location to a second aircraft, which navigated autonomously to the target, delivered a payload, and returned to base alongside the scout aircraft.
Honeywell engineers spent approximately three months developing and deploying the target-detection and tracking model, building the mission in simulation and conducting flight tests in Minnesota and Arizona. The work shows how the autonomy platform can integrate mission-specific capabilities with core autonomous flight functions.
Hivemind Enterprise provides capabilities such as route planning, mission management, and inter-aircraft communications. These functions allow developers to focus on integrating their own AI models, sensors, and mission systems rather than developing every autonomy function independently.
"Hivemind Enterprise handled the autonomy basics, so the team could spend its time on its own detection and tracking model," said Tom Schaefer, vice president of Hivemind Enterprise at Shield AI. Schaefer said Honeywell's engineers completed their first autonomous flight within weeks, a task engineering leads estimated would normally take a year.
The demonstrations build on a July 2026 memorandum of understanding under which Honeywell Aerospace is developing an autonomy software stack using Hivemind Enterprise. The companies plan to define how the platform will integrate with Honeywell's avionics, navigation and sensing technologies, with potential applications for larger uncrewed aircraft and commercial aviation.
Shield AI says Hivemind has been used on more than 40 platforms, including F-16 fighter aircraft, jet-powered uncrewed aircraft, helicopters, uncrewed surface vessels, ground vehicles and a satellite in low Earth orbit.
