Cinder Is A New American Autonomous Attack Drone

A new American long-range one-way attack drone called Cinder promises a game-changing new capability: precisely hitting distant targets, including tanks, at low cost.

Drone makers Dragoon are teaming up with Teledyne FLIR OEM to offer this capability in their bid for a Pentagon project called Artemis. Unlike previous drones, Artemis seeks drones to operate in areas of intense radio-frequency jamming that knocks out GPS navigation and direct links to an operator. Also unlike previous drones, they will be bought in large numbers.

“This is a groundbreaking development,” Art Stout, director of product management, artificial intelligence solutions, Teledyne FLIR OEM told me. “Fully autonomous operations are a viable solution for today’s GPS and RF-denied environments.”

Project Artemis

In March, the DIU announced that it has awarded contracts to four companies for long-range, one-way platforms for Artemis. The project takes inspiration from Ukraine, where large numbers of Russian Lancets and their Ukrainian equivalents have been making a disproportionate impact: low-cost, low-speed precision weapons driven by propellers, very unlike the high-speed, high-cost missiles currently favored by the U.S. Army. Unlike Artemis though, these drones require human guidance.

The DIU requires the ground-launched drones will be ‘affordable’ – whatever that means to the Pentagon – and have a range of 50-300 km, far in excess of small FPVs. They will strike deep and hit air defence sites, long-range artillery and missile launch sites, as well as enemy formations far beyond the reach of most weapons.

Crucially the new drones operate without satellite navigation and when communications with the operator are disrupted, requiring a high degree of autonomy.

The timescale is extremely aggressive. Companies have to complete prototyping and demonstrate success by the end of this month.

This short lead time may explain why Dragoon teamed with Teledyne FLIR OEM to use their suite off-the-shelf software designed for exactly this type of mission. Two products, Prism™ Supervisor and Prism SKR, seem almost tailor made to meet the DIU requirements.

Smart Software: Supervisor And SKR

Prism Supervisor is the onboard commander, providing what the makers terms ‘end-to-end autonomy and mission oversight.’

“Supervisor is a software layer that sits between the auto pilot and the seeker to enable a weapon to react to what it encounters while operating autonomously within a predefined search area,” says Stout.

This enables the drone to plot a route, likely using visual navigation where satellite navigation is jammed, and navigate to the specified location.

This is where Prism SKR – pronounced ‘Seeker’—comes into play. The SKR software is linked to the FLIR Boson camera module, from the same makers, and allows users to easily create applications. Reliable, efficient Automatic Target Recognition or ATR has long been a Holy Grail for weapon developers, allowing munitions to detect and identify targets on their own, a true ‘fire and forget’ capability. The makers claim that Prism SKR is the best in class.

According to the specifications, SKR comes off the shelf able to identify and distinguish hardware including Russian T-62, T-72, T-80 and T-90 tanks, and other items can be added as needed.

“The AI models can be easily upgraded or switched out with improved models based on additional training or new classes based on mission requirements,” says Stout.

In addition to detecting and identifying targets, SKR tracks them, then guides the drone in for a precise hit.

“The software output target location and track data to the platform’s auto pilot and articulated flight control surfaces to strike targets at a specific aim point,” says Stout.

This puts it far ahead of current lock-on-target drone guidance in Ukraine which simply flies directly at the target. Localization means selecting a particular aim point depending on target type. For example, when targeting a T-72 tank, simply hitting the thick frontal armor will barely leave a scratch. The smart approach is to fly around and hit the turret rear where armor is thinnest and a hit will cause instant destruction,

SKR also has what the makers call ‘Target state estimation’ which seems to mean using the thermal imager to determine whether the engine is on or not. This allows it to distinguish live targets from burned-out hulks and inflatable decoys.

Veterans And Young Guns In Competition

Dragoon and Teledyne FLIR OEM are up against some familiar names for Artemis.

AeroVironment might be considered the incumbents, long established suppliers of small drones to the U.S. army and makers of the Switchblade series of loitering munitions supplied to Ukraine. The current range are operator controlled, but AeroVironment have long been touting autonomous capability for their drones. Perhaps the biggest question mark there is whether the company, used to operating in a world where no expense is spared (their small Switchblade 300 comes in at over $50,000 a shot), can change gears to a new world of affordable drones.

The there is Auterion, a startup already supplying Ukraine with AI hardware and software brining target-seeking capability and more to attack drones, and which has teamed up with a Ukrainian drone maker. Finally, there is Swan Tech, another U.S. defense software company specializing in ‘scalable autonomous products’ who have also paired with Ukrainian drone makers.

If any of these can meet the DIU requirements, they will potentially open up a new type of autonomous warfare carried out with mass attacks by long-range drones.

“Autonomous loitering munitions and attritables like Artemis are a new class of weapon that builds on the prior platforms like SwitchBlade that relied on operators to fly the platform into targets,” says Stout.

The Autonomy Debate And The Reality In Ukraine

AI-enabled weapons, like those with Auterion hardware, are becoming increasingly common and increasingly capable in Ukraine. However, a successful outcome for Artemis does not mean that the U.S. will immediately start deploying fully autonomous weapons capable of seeking out and attacking targets on their own.

Pentagon Directive 3000.09 on Autonomy in Weapon Systems, updated in 2023, lays out the rules around deploying autonomous weapons, seeking to “minimize the probability and consequences of failures in autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems that could lead to unintended engagements” – in plain language, making sure the killer robots do not attack the wrong people.

Gregory Allen, director of the Project on AI Governance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that by 2023, no weapon system had been even submitted to the stringent review process for autonomous weapons, and there was general confusion about how the process worked. The 2023 update has brought some clarity and projects like Artemis which specifically aim to develop autonomous weapons suggest there is now an appetite to push forward in this area.

This is likely driven by the speed of drone volution in Ukraine, where last week military intelligence started warning of a new type of AI-guided Russian drone, immune to jamming, which flies up and down roads looking for targets. The Ukrainians are trying to get hold of an intact one to analyse it.

Previous Russian AI drones have been limited in capability and rely on U.S. hardware acquired illegally through third parties. This is one area where the U.S. is far behind but could easily regain a decisive lead — if the determination is there.