Every UASFeed story on AeroVironment — across defense, counter-UAS, industry, commercial, policy, and tech, newest first.
A taxonomy of the drone-mothership concept across air, sea, and ground domains — from robotic combat vehicles and containerized launchers to submarine tenders — and why range-stacking and cost asymmetry are reshaping every branch of warfare.
Read the story →A verified cost ladder across drone classes, from $500 FPV strike drones to a $618 million MQ-4C Triton, showing why unit cost, all-up-round cost, and program cost are not the same number.
The Army issued the first task order under AeroVironment's $500M Domestic Shield IDIQ on July 6, sending $80.5M worth of Titan-MS counter-drone sensors to Air Force Global Strike Command bases after Barksdale AFB's repeated 2026 incursions.
DroneShield sharpened its RF detection and tracking software on July 6 just as the Pentagon handed AeroVironment a potential $500 million counter-drone contract, underscoring a red-hot C-UAS market racing to outpace cheaper, faster drone threats.
German drone maker Quantum Systems closed a $1.2 billion Series D at an $8 billion valuation on July 2, 2026, backed by Blackstone, Airbus and Advent, days after the U.S. Army tapped its Vector AI as a Company-Level sUAS candidate.
The Army has handed AeroVironment a $500M, three-year ordering vehicle to buy layered commercial counter-UAS gear against Group 1-3 drones — a shift from bespoke buys toward a standing anti-drone pipeline.
AeroVironment crushed estimates with a record $641.6M fiscal Q4, doubled annual revenue to nearly $2B, and grew funded backlog to $1.2B — sending shares up ~19% and turning 'drone supercycle' talk into public-market fact.
From Paul MacCready's human-powered aircraft to a $990 million Switchblade contract and a $4.1 billion BlueHalo merger, AeroVironment has quietly become the backbone of U.S. tactical UAS — and is now reshaping itself into a multi-domain defense-tech mid-prime.
AeroVironment's RQ-20 Puma AE is a hand-launched, battery-electric small UAS that operates from ship decks to desert outposts, delivering day/night ISR without a runway. A two-decade operational record and front-line deployments in Ukraine make it the Group 1/2 benchmark for allied militaries worldwide.
From a 1.77-kilogram backpackable drone that proved itself in Ukrainian urban combat to a 65-pound tank-killer now in battalion-level service, AeroVironment's Switchblade family is the U.S. Army's answer to the loitering munition era — built around a single patented capability: the ability to abort at the last second.
From Israel's 1989 Harpy to Ukraine's Lancet hunter-killer teams, loitering munitions fuse sensor and effector into a single expendable platform — a category distinct from both the cruise missile and the reusable drone, and now in procurement at scale across 50-plus countries.
AeroVironment and Taiwan's Ubiqconn Technology have signed an MOU to build a common drone-controller ecosystem for Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense, which is pursuing procurement of tens of thousands of domestically produced UAS — and needs a single interface to run all of them.
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