U.S. company Neros has won a contract to deliver 6,000 FPV attack drones to Ukraine over 6 months, believed to be the highest rate for any U.S. producer ever. This is part of an international effort supplying drones to Ukraine. Making large numbers of FPVs fast has been challenging for U.S. producers, but it is core to Neros’ way of working.
“One of the first things we did when we started the company was go to Ukraine, and we were told that if we could not make 5,000 drones per month we were essentially useless,” Neros co-founder and CEO Soren Monroe-Anderson told me. “So we set out with this in mind.”
This stands in contrast to the Pentagon’s Replicator program, which was set a similar challenge of building large numbers of drones at speed, and aims to deliver just 3,000 drones over two years.
Making high-quality FPVs at scale is difficult. Doing it without using ubiquitous Chinese components looks almost impossible. But Monroe-Anderson and co-founder Olaf Hichwa know more about these drones than most. Both are former professional-level sports FPV pilots and their insights have driven the company’s success.
Challenge 1: Removing China from the Equation
China dominates the drone market, with one company, Shenzhen-based DJI, producing an estimated 70% of all consumer drones. Both Ukraine and Russia now make FPV drones on a huge scale, each producing more than a million a year — but they do it largely with components imported from China.
Even now some U.S. makers rely on Chinese components. This caused embarrassment recently when deliveries by Skydio were impacted by an embargo by Chinese battery suppliers. That is the exactly sort of problem Neros has worked hard to avoid. (Incidentally, Neros is also on China’s sanction list).
“Historically, the hardest components to source outside of China have been motors and cameras,” says Monroe-Anderson. “For both we have worked closely with partners to scale up production lines outside of China.”
Neros has shown that cutting the Chinese out is feasible, though at a price.
“Unfortunately, there still exist a huge difference in cost and capability between Chinese and Western manufacturing for drone components,” says Monroe-Anderson.
At present, a U.S. made drone will be more expensive than its Chinese counterpart. But even the most challenging technology can be made domestically where there is the will.
“In a lot of ways, the ground control system is more complicated than the drone,” says Soren-Anderson. “We also build these in-house.”
Aggressive vertical integration means that Neros make all the key components themselves, so there is no reliance on third-party manufacturers.
Challenge 2: The Need for Speed
Apart from China, the other problem is that, historically, small U.S military drones have been a boutique business, with contracts for small numbers.
“The largest U.S. drone companies are only setup to make a few thousand drones per year,” says Monroe-Anderson. “Any drone company that started before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and has the DoD as their primary customer has never been handed a serious demand for large quantities, which means this was never instilled from the beginning in the design of the product and the factory.”
Existing suppliers have never created production lines for the sort of volumes that are now needed. This is why, for example, Anduril are building their ‘hyperscale’ new Arsenal 1 facility in Ohio.
The other issue is that the focus has been on what the military call ‘ISR’ – Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance or scout drones. These are designed to be reusable and, as the military requires, they are built to the highest possible standards.
When these are converted into one-way attack drones, also known as loitering munitions, the result is a seriously expansive single-use item.
“You get something priced similar to traditional missile systems which blows up a ridiculously expensive set of components every time they are used,” says Monroe-Anderson. “It mainly comes down to the DoD’s willingness to pay for extremely expensive systems.”
Neros started with a clean sheet and with scalability in mind. Even in Ukraine, Soren -Anderson was struck by the lack of assembly-line style operations in the FPV industry, as well as the fact that even largest producers were using hobbyist-style drone configurations systems, which were not well suited for large-scale production.
“We’ve had the mandate of mass-manufacturing from day one of the company and built our product and factory around this,” says Soren Anderson. “We’ve done away with many of the hobbyist quirks of FPV drones to make a product that is more manufacturable while still being modular and repairable.”
Enter the Archer
The fruit of this design process is an FPV attack drone called Archer, an 8” FPV which “exceeds state of the art performance” (one senses Soren-Anderson’s competitive racing instinct at work) and carries a 2 kg/4.5-pound warhead to a range of over 20 kilometers/12 miles. It is supplied with two different batteries depending on the mission
Archer flies day and night, and in adverse weather conditions. It operates on multiple control frequencies and has a wide-band video transmitter. Radio-frequency jamming is the bane of drones and reportedly prevents a large proportion of FPVs from reaching their targets. It has been a particular challenge for US-made systems, like the Skydio drones which were reportedly vulnerable to jamming.
“Jamming is a problem for everyone, including us, but we have shown very strong results,” says Soren-Anderson. “Because we design all our radios ourselves and have been learning from what works in Ukraine for over a year, we are using a completely different setup than other US drone companies. This goes back to my point on not relying on other companies for core capabilities.”
The Ukraine contract does not include payloads. As with other FPVs, the Ukrainians will use their own locally-made warheads, but there are other options.
“Neros is working on purpose-built, lethal payloads with our partner, Kraken Kinetics,” says Monroe-Anderson. “We’ve seen that the system as a whole is much more performant when the drone and warhead are designed together, so we’ve put a large priority on this effort.”
All this highly capable technology sounds good. But can Neros tackle the other major issue of U.S. drones: prices which make them unaffordable in large numbers? Some have been known to cost more than their weight in gold.
“Archer is an order of magnitude cheaper than other small drones on the BlueUAS list,” says Soren-Anderson.
That means that Archer can be acquired in volume. The 6,000 for Ukraine are being bought by the International Drone Capability Coalition, which does not have the Pentagon’s drone budget. The low cost also simplifies training as users do not need to worry about crashing expensive hardware.
There are plans for the future, but for now Neros is all about Archer.
“We are extremely focused on making the most capable and manufacturable FPV system in the Western world,” says Soren Anderson. “Aside from this contract from the IDCC, Archer was just made the first FPV drone added to the BlueUAS list. “
This is the list of drones approved for purchase by U.S, government agencies, set up due to the security concerns over Chinese models. There are already potential customers for Archer in the Marine Corps, Air Force, Army and Special Forces.
Monroe-Anderson is proud of Neros’ progress. But he knows there is a lot of catching up to do when Russia is already making so many drones.
“Our adversaries can produce millions of FPVs,” he says. “Right now, the US military is way behind most of the world in using FPV drones, and we want to fix this.”
Source: Forbes