On Monday, October 27 2025, Red Cat Holdings, Inc. announced that its Black Widow™ drone, a platform already accepted into the U.S. Army’s Short‑Range Reconnaissance (SRR) program of record, successfully completed a series of flight tests using Palantir Technologies’ Visual Navigation (VNav) software. The tests demonstrated that the drone can navigate in GPS‑denied environments by leveraging Palantir’s edge‑based sensor‑fusion technology, marking the first commercial demonstration of visual‑navigation software on a drone in an Army‑approved program.
The flight test series evaluated VNav across nominal and GPS‑denied conditions, including high‑speed and low‑altitude missions. Palantir engineers reported a mean positional error of approximately 7 meters over a 2.7‑kilometer route, with continuous positional awareness throughout the mission profile—cruising to a target, descending for surveillance, flying local waypoints, and returning—without any additional hardware beyond the drone’s existing onboard sensors. The successful validation confirms VNav’s capability to provide reliable navigation in contested environments.
This milestone expands Palantir’s defense portfolio by delivering a ready‑to‑deploy AI navigation solution for the Army’s SRR program. Red Cat and Palantir are now working toward a formal Army demonstration and a fully productized VNav capability for all fielded Black Widow systems, positioning the partnership to enhance the U.S. military’s autonomous ISR operations.
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