NODA AI takes $10M to keep Pentagon robot fleets fighting after jammers cut the link

A $10 million award buys the Pentagon an orchestration layer rather than another airframe, software meant to hold a commander's intent across drones, boats and ground robots from any maker after electronic warfare kills the link.

The Department of War awarded NODA AI $10 million on Wednesday for MAESTRO, software built to keep drones, boats, ground robots and undersea vehicles executing a commander's orders after jamming or a cyberattack severs their links, Defence Blog wrote. The award falls under the Pentagon's Multi-Domain Collaborative Autonomy program.

Dylan Malyasov carried that report, and the Austin company announced the award the same day. No second newsroom has confirmed the contract, and the version republished elsewhere is Malyasov's piece.

MAESTRO stands for Multi-Domain Autonomous Enhanced System for Tactical Reasoning and Orchestration. The stated design goal is vendor neutrality, translating a commander's intent into coordinated action across airframes, hulls and ground vehicles built by different firms and holding what the company calls custody of that intent through denied, degraded, intermittent and limited communications. NODA's own site puts its abstraction layer at more than 30 manufacturer vehicle and control systems from subsurface to space. That count comes from the company.

The contract names LUCAS, the Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System reverse-engineered from Iran's Shahed-136 and produced by Arizona's SpektreWorks at a reported $35,000 a unit, with roughly 500 miles of range. US forces flew LUCAS against Iran in Operation Epic Fury, DefenseScoop noted this week. NODA's integration work also covers MUSIC, Vigilant Spirit and Arbitrator, and the deal obliges the company to deliver an interface and standards report the government keeps for later competitions with other vendors.

Russia and China have both put money into jamming radio and GPS to blind American drones and robots, Malyasov noted. Dr. An Tran, prototyping director in the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, framed the award in those terms: "Affordable mass only matters if that mass can think and fight as one team when the network degrades." Pentagon CTO Emil Michael told DefenseScoop on Tuesday that the next APFIT cohort will favor systems that "can be made cheaply at scale," citing Ukraine, Russia, Iran and the Pacific.

Validation comes through live, multi-domain demonstrations, including range testing of NODA's tactical algorithms under communications-contested conditions.