Red Cat completes flight testing of Palantir’s VNav drone software

Red Cat (RCAT) announced the successful flight testing of its Black Widow drone equipped with Palantir Technologies (PLTR) Visual Navigation Software. The test demonstrated that the Black Widow drone, currently part of the U.S. Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance program of record, can navigate in GPS-denied conditions using Palantir’s visual-based navigation software. This marks the first known commercial demonstration of visual navigation software on a drone already accepted into a U.S. Army program. VNav uses edge-based sensor fusion to generate real-time position estimates from visual cues and inertial data, enabling navigation in denied or degraded environments. No additional hardware was required for any of the flights, as VNav runs entirely on the Black Widow’s existing onboard sensors.