The U.S. Army has developed a drone to locate and retrieve downed enemy UAVs for extracting data from onboard computers and further analysis.
This was reported by Defense One.
A group of soldiers from the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, working with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to create a prototype recovery system, won the innovation award at the first Best Drone Warfighter Сompetition.
Speaking at the Army Aviation Warfighter Summit on Thursday, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Reed said the idea emerged after “a couple beverages” when he and the 28th Infantry Division innovation team were invited to take part in the competition in late 2025.
“So we wanted to come up with something that wasn’t just the run-of-the-mill, Army-type system, something that industry would be excited about and potentially be able to take and make it scale from there,” he said.
That led to Project RED (Recovery Exploitation Drone), an unmanned system that uses artificial intelligence to search for downed enemy drones. It is also equipped with a robotic arm to grab the devices and return them to the unit.
The US company Talon Avionics has also developed an active defense system based on interceptor drones with acoustic guidance to counter FPV drones.
The SECTR system is built around the modular launch platform of the SECTR-IK-02 interceptor station, which can support up to 100 launch tubes with interceptor drones and is controlled from a single control station.
The interceptor drone itself, together with the launch tube, weighs 700 grams and is equipped with an array of 16 microphones. It scans the airspace in all directions, creating a narrow acoustic “beam” that searches for the sound signatures of enemy drones. After locking onto a confirmed target, the drone heads directly toward it.
