Drone operating system: Rheinmetall and Auterion conclude multi-year agreement

On the basis of a multi-year agreement, Rheinmetall and Auterion, provider of a drone operating system, will work closely together in future. The goal is standardised, software-based components for unmanned drone systems.

According to the partners, they are pooling their expertise “to establish a military industry standard for the control and operation of unmanned drone systems in the air, on land and at sea”. In addition to joint product development, the cooperation also covers the sale of unmanned platforms. Military users are to benefit considerably from the resulting unified operating system.

The drone manufacturer's experience for the drone operating system

As a drone manufacturer, Rheinmetall brings operational experience with the Luna NG and Aladin systems to the partnership. The Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) introduced several drone systems from the Düsseldorf-based technology group many years ago; they have also been in use in Ukraine for a few months.

“In Ukraine we see more than two hundred different airborne unmanned systems. This makes training the military very costly and time-consuming, and the systems are not interoperable. The cooperation with Auterion and the development of a unified operating system will enable the efficient and scalable use of unmanned systems. With our approach, there will be no need in future for system-dependent user training or system-specific integration into an overall system network.”— Timo Haas, Chief Digital Officer of Rheinmetall AG

“In future, drones will be used in large numbers and, like computers and smartphones, they need a common operating system to make this possible. Auterion OS allows the customer to bring all drones onto a common basis and to integrate different manufacturers into a common architecture. Our software stack is already field-proven and thus enables Software Defined Defence.”— Lorenz Meier, CEO of Auterion