TACTERA development and demonstrations
The UK Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) first awarded Flare Bright a contract in 2021 for the supply of the SnapShot ruggedised nanodrone. The sUAS was designed to provide simple ways to get aerial images in harsh conditions.
In 2023, after evaluations of SnapShot, DASA announced a follow-up agreement to provide the same autonomy in powered drones to give increased persistence and endurance.
“The first demonstrations were about four years ago with the UK MoD,” Hamilton said. “We were flying GPS-free for about 30 seconds. Then, they gave us funding to fly for about 20 minutes.
He explained that the DEVCOM C5ISR also got interested at that time and, alongside the UK MoD, required the company to fly for a longer time to prove the system’s capacities.
“We moved on to an even bigger aircraft that could fly for an hour,” Hamilton continued. “Then, in October 2023, in Wales, we did these flights for the UK MoD, as well as off the coast of Barcelona in Spain. We flew for an hour over land and sea to show US Army DEVCOM.”
After that, the company continued working on the development of TACTERA and conducted other trials and demonstrations including with swarms of drones.
“We were basically being evaluated for frontline use, and we are pretty much ready [for that],” Hamilton asserted.
The TACTERA software solution, produced by UK aerospace supplier Flare Bright, will be unveiled this week at the SOF Week 2025 exhibition in Tampa, Florida, as it targets potential interest in GPS-free navigation systems for drones deployed in contested environments from the US and UK militaries.
According to Flare Bright, the development of the capability has received resources from the UK Ministry of Defence and the US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command C5ISR Center (DEVCOM C5ISR). Both countries have already tested the system while it was being built.
Speaking to Shephard, Flare Bright CEO Kelvin Hamilton explained that TACTERA was engineered to be an “unjamable and unspoothable”, affordable strike-grade absolute navigation system to provide high accuracy in any weather and terrain, as well as in night or day conditions in which “machine vision struggles”.
“We basically put together an automotive LIDAR sensor, an off-the-shelf computer and something like a two-meter resolution map,” Hamilton remarked. “[For drone operation] all you have to do is bolt it on, and you can fly around really low and really fast.”
He stressed that, without relying on cameras or comms, the system provides similar accuracy to multi-million missiles by using COTS “that cost about US$1,000 in total”.
“We are totally focused on these low, fast, affordable mass, bringing affordable high mass back for battle space,” Hamilton remarked.
TACTERA can be upgraded to TACTERA Marine with a plugin to provide long-range GPS-free navigation over open water.
“You get this unique capability for the Pacific, and you can cross hundreds of kilometres of open ocean with small enough error,” Hamilton claimed. “It fits quite well with the tilt to the Pacific that the US is certainly going on at the moment.”