The Dronecode Foundation is excited to announce that Rajant Corporation has joined as a Silver Member. Headquartered in Malvern, Pennsylvania, Rajant has spent 25 years on one of the hardest problems in autonomy, which is keeping machines connected while they are moving through places conventional networks cannot reach.
Their Kinetic Mesh networking treats each aircraft as part of the network rather than as a client of a ground station, so drones relay for one another and traffic reroutes itself as the fleet moves. The practical difference shows up when a vehicle drifts out of range. An autonomous system that loses its link usually has to stop and wait, so a network that heals around the gap is what keeps a fleet working.
Rajant has been proving this out in demanding company for years. DARPA’s OFFSET program had them supplying air-to-air, air-to-ground, and ground-to-ground connectivity for large swarms of collaborative vehicles, and their nodes have worked alongside robotics partners including Boston Dynamics. They have also pushed the hardware small enough to matter here, with the Finch module putting a full mesh node on the kind of compact airframe our community actually builds. Their more recent work on edge computing carries the same architecture into onboard intelligence, which is where Don Gilbreath sees the collaboration heading.
“Rajant joined the Dronecode Foundation because autonomous systems increasingly require more than reliable connectivity. They require distributed intelligence, resilient communications, and orchestration at the edge. By bringing together Kinetic Mesh networking with Rajant’s expanding edge intelligence capabilities, we’re excited to collaborate with the Dronecode community and explore new possibilities for connected autonomous systems.”
Don Gilbreath, VP of Robotics and Drone Technology, Rajant Corporation
Members working a layer below the flight stack bring a perspective the community needs, and Rajant arrives with a long track record and a real interest in supporting the open source ecosystem. We warmly welcome Rajant to the Dronecode Foundation and look forward to seeing what the community builds alongside them!
