Red Cat Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:RCAT) shares jumped 8.3% in premarket trading on Monday after the company announced it had successfully completed flight tests of its Black Widow drone equipped with Palantir Technologies (NYSE:PLTR) Visual Navigation Software.
The tests showed that the Black Widow drone—part of the U.S. Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance program—can operate effectively in GPS-denied environments by using Palantir’s visual-based navigation technology. This marks the first commercial demonstration of such software on a drone already integrated into a U.S. Army program.
“This is a breakthrough moment not just for Red Cat, but for the tactical needs of the Department of War,” said Jeff Thompson, CEO of Red Cat. “Every battlefield is a GPS-denied environment, and this successful test shows that Red Cat and Palantir are delivering a software-driven solution the Army can rely on.”
According to the company, the testing confirmed seamless integration with the Black Widow flight controller, precise navigation without GPS, stable performance at low altitudes and speeds up to 16 mph, and reliable operation in low-light settings. Palantir’s Visual Navigation achieved an average positional error of around 7 meters over a 2.7-kilometer route.
Notably, the technology requires no extra hardware and runs entirely on the drone’s existing onboard sensors. Red Cat and Palantir now plan to move toward a formal demonstration with the U.S. Army and develop a fully productized version of the capability for all fielded Black Widow systems.