News about drones

The U.S. Air Force awarded Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) production contracts to General Atomics (FQ-42 Vengeance) and Anduril (FQ-44 Fury), leaving Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin out of the hardware competition. Northrop still made the list of CCA software vendors, alongside Anduril, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, RTX and Shield AI. Using its own funds, Northrop built the YFQ-48A Talon Blue, a fixed-wing prototype based on a Scaled Composites aircraft, which made a fully autonomous first flight earlier this month running Northrop's Prism Mission Autonomy software. The drone is powered by a single Pratt & Whitney PW500 turbofan with a reported 700-mile range, and Northrop may enter it in the Increment 2 competition. If the Air Force does not buy it, the article notes the company would likely write off the cost as research and development.

AIBotics, Inc. (OTCID: AIBT) has completed its acquisition of the operating assets of NovaCore Labs from PlayJamaica Limited, expanding its presence in Jamaica and across CARICOM. The assets include 10 service robots, six commercial drones, mapping equipment, a mapping vehicle, and the NovaCore brand and intellectual property. The consideration is 22,500 shares of Series B Preferred Stock with a stated value of $225,000, plus an earn-out of up to $3.0 million in additional preferred stock if cumulative gross revenue reaches $500,000, $1.5 million, $3.0 million and $5.0 million over four years. Gregory Moore will lead the business as president, with a budget targeting $1.0 million of capital deployment over 12 months, while NovaCore plans to expand AI, LiDAR and geospatial services, drone operations, automation, and training programs with the University of the West Indies Global Campus and the University of Technology.