What's next for the Pentagon after the Replicator programme?
Although the Replicator initiative has made several accomplishments, there are still multiple gaps to plug across the US Department of Defense (DoD) and its services.
DroneMetrex has provided aerial mapping services with its TopoDrone-100 UAV system for a new recycling and waste management client in Australia.
According to the company, the client had a requirement for an aerial mapping solution to monitor existing waste mounds under a licence from the Environment Protection Authority (EPA). The client also required base maps to be created to inform future planned expansion of the waste site.
DroneMetrex supplied its photogrammetric mapping TopoDrone-100 UAV system to capture 2.5cm GSD aerial imagery with 25mm absolute accuracy of the 4sq.km site.
The flight was conducted over a 60 minute period, during which company specialists measured by kinematic GPS survey 10 detailed features to use as the GCP's for the photogrammetric processing. The data processing took 2 hours.
Tom Tadrowski, executive director, DroneMetrex, says: ‘Because the TopoDrone-100 uses our unique (patent-pending) Gyro-stabilised Active Mount (DMX-GAM), which houses a 24Mp digital camera with Zeiss lens, full-framed sensor and leaf-shutter, the imagery captured is ‘photogrammetry-ready’. To explain; each image is near-nadir, no crab, and without the random geometric errors of all other digital camera systems.
‘We then process with our own software in the pre-processing stage correcting for the known systematic errors. Once we have the photogrammetric aerial triangulation, and then the generation of the dense point-cloud, we treat this as our base product which allows us to further generate the DTM, DSM, digital orthophoto mosaic, contours and profiles.’
Although the Replicator initiative has made several accomplishments, there are still multiple gaps to plug across the US Department of Defense (DoD) and its services.
Cummings Aerospace presented its turbojet-powered Hellhound loitering munition at SOF Week 2025, offering a man-portable solution aligned with the US Army’s LASSO requirements.
PDW has revealed its Attritable Multirotor First Person View drone at SOF Week 2025, offering special operations forces a low-cost, rapidly deployable platform for strike and ISR missions, inspired by battlefield lessons from Ukraine.
Teledyne FLIR is highlighting the emerging requirements for 'recoverable and re-usable' loitering munitions across the contemporary operating environment during this week’s SOF Week conference in Tampa, Florida.
High-performance maritime industry player Kraken Technology Group, based in the UK, has used the SOF Week conference in Tampa, Florida this week to debut its K3 Scout uncrewed surface vessel (USV) to the North American market.
Red Cat and Palladyne AI recently conducted a cross-platform collaborative flight involving three diverse heterogeneous drones.