DSEI 2025: Red Cat’s Black Widow Reconnaissance Drone

Red Cat, a US-based drone manufacturer, showcased its flagship product, the Black Widow, at DSEI UK 2025. Produced by its subsidiary Teal Drones, the Black Widow is a short-range reconnaissance drone featuring advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and electronic warfare (EW) resistant technology. During the exhibition, Calibre Defence spoke with company representatives to learn more.

Key features: Black Widow

The Black Widow is a short-range reconnaissance (SRR) drone with a range of 8km and a flight endurance of over 45 minutes, flying at approximately 13 m/s (47 km/h). On 11 September, the drone was approved for the NATO NSPA Catalogue, which provides a streamlined acquisition process for NATO member nations. The agreement is based on a three-year contract with options for two additional years. Additionally, the Black Widow was recently selected for the US Army’s SRR program.

According to Stan Nowak, Red Cat’s Vice President of Marketing, the company’s NDAA compliance and supply chain resilience are key differentiators. He added that Red Cat can currently manufacture 2,000 Black Widow drones or 5,000 FPVs per month, with the capacity to scale production to meet demand.

Geoff Hitchcock, Red Cat’s Chief Revenue Officer, emphasised the Black Widow’s modularity and the ease of field repair. He noted that the drone is designed to be repaired by the user in the field, which reduces the cost and loss of capability that comes with more traditional units that need to be returned to the manufacturer.

Ground control and command links 

The drone’s ground control system (GCS), known as WEB (Warfighter Electronic Bridge), uses Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK) software. This integration enables WEB to seamlessly interface with the Black Widow and other robotic solutions currently under development, including Trichon, an extended short-range reconnaissance drone with VTOL capabilities, and Fang, an FPV drone with both ISR and kinetic capabilities. The WEB GCS and its ability to command and control the ARACHNID Family (Red Cat’s ISR and precision effects systems) exists to “reduce the cognitive load” on the user, as Nowak states. It achieves this by enhancing situational awareness and integrating mission-management capabilities.

Both the Black Widow and the WEB GCS are fitted with channel and band-hopping radio links. Specifically, the Black Widow is equipped with the Hex-Band Radio from Doodle Labs, which allows it to operate on frequency bands M1-M6 (1625-2510 MHz). This system utilises Doodle Labs’ ‘Sense’ software, which actively monitors for in-band interference and switches between the strongest, most viable options to evade jamming signals. Since its original tests in Ukraine in 2024, when the Black Widow demonstrated its ability to take photos of a target from 4km while being jammed, the software has been significantly improved. According to Hitchcock, the latest software stack enables the drone to fly in an RF-jammed environment and can even be used to jam other drones.

The Black Widow also features a stealth mode that allows operators to pre-load a mission into the drone. Once the mission is saved, communications can be disabled to reduce detectability, allowing the drone to autonomously execute the mission and proceed to a pre-established waypoint or recovery location. This feature helps to reduce the impact of RF detection, a common method used to track and counter drones.

Black Widow and VNav

In December 2024, Red Cat partnered with Palantir to equip the Black Widow with Palantir’s VNav (vision navigation) software, enabling the drone to navigate in GPS-denied environments during both day and night. The VNav system relies on the drone’s camera for navigation. It uses visual inertial odometry to combine data from the camera with the drone’s onboard sensors. Simultaneously, the drone compares its live camera feed with stored satellite images, which are constantly refreshed. By matching key terrain features in the satellite imagery with what the camera sees, the drone can accurately determine its position.

The Black Widow also has an optional software add-on called Reveal Farsight, which specialises in 3D mapping with near-real-time processing. This software processes surveillance video during flight to create a detailed analysis, including line-of-sight analysis, AI route planning, helicopter landing zone surveying, and terrain analysis.

An additional add-on is Sightline Intelligence’s Aided Target Recognition (AiTR). This software employs a multi-stage framework, beginning with detection, where the AI searches for objects of interest using ultra-low latency bounding box detection. In the second stage, the software classifies each detected object into a relevant category, such as vehicle type and colour or whether a person is armed or civilian. Based on this analysis, the user can then select objects of interest for tracking. The software has been extensively trained with over 850,000 bounding-box annotations and more than 140 unique object classes.

Calibre comment

Following the dramatic increase in the use of sUAS in Ukraine and the resulting rise in GPS jamming and counter-UAS electronic warfare technology, the need for drones that can reliably operate in GPS-denied environments is evident. There appears to be a number of standards emerging for how to achieve this, from inertial navigation combined with LiDAR terrain scanning, through to computer vision, and radio navigation. Building a hardened radio link that can quickly and reactively hop between frequencies to avoid jamming is one option, but could come unstuck with more modern forms of EW that spoof GPS signals or attack a system in different ways. Combining that system with computer vision, however, does appear to be a technically sound and robust solution.

By Austin Haywood, published on September 11, 2025. Credit for the lead image is Red Cat and shows the Black Widow drone.