Ornadyne's O1, a wing-flapping drone designed to look like a bird, evaded sensor detection during a recent Air Force tech exercise in the Mojave Desert. Unlike most drones, the small unmanned aerial system uses flapping wings rather than propellers to stay aloft, allowing it to collect intelligence or survey areas at low altitudes.
"It looks like a bird, it moves similar to a bird, and humans and counter-UAS systems can misclassify it as a bird," Armen Arakelyan, one of Ornadyne's co-founders, said in a Department of Defense release. "It's also a lot quieter because we replaced propellers with flapping wings."
The test took place during the military's annual "Game of Drones" event at Edwards Air Force Base in September. The event, sponsored by the Air Force 412th Test Wing's Experimental Test Force and the Defense Contract Management Agency's Blue List team, is held each quarter to test new technology. It was the first time Ornadyne tested its ability to hide from detection systems built by other private companies.
"We learned during 'Game of Drones' that sensors deployed by the other companies here could not establish our drone using their detection equipment," said Geourg Kivijian, Ornadyne's other co-founder. "It registered as a bird, which is exactly what we wanted."
The O1 weighs 1 pound and can fly up to 10 kilometers, or a little more than 6 miles, for over an hour, according to a company fact sheet. It can carry a small payload such as a camera for target recognition. The company says it can alter the drone's color, wingspan, proportions and silhouette to match a native bird species in a given region. Ornadyne is not the first to pursue bird-like designs; in 2024, a People's Liberation Army exercise showed a Chinese Jiaolong Commando releasing a drone resembling a Eurasian tree sparrow.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing