For as long as there have been swarms of drones on the battlefield, defense companies have been trying to figure out quick, effective ways of jamming or shooting them down.
Allen Control Systems (ACS) is one of them.
Today, the company announced that it has been tapped to demo its tech at the Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Systems Office’s (JCO) sixth C-sUAS demonstration in April. If successful, the company will win R&D dollars to develop its robo-gun, called Bullfrog™, further.
For the past few years, the Texas-based company has been working on an AI-powered robotic machine gun system that can target and destroy UAS systems.
“[Bullfrog] is a full kill chain solution,” ACS CEO Steven Simoni told Tectonic, “It does the full detection, identification, track and defeat. Plus, it’s under 300 pounds, so it can go on any sort of vehicle.”
Rise of the robots: ACS was founded in 2022 by Simoni, who made his name founding Bbot, a software and robotics restaurant technology company that DoorDash acquired. He set out to use his robotics knowledge to automate one of the most dangerous things on the battlefield—the gun tower. Manually operated guns expose their operators to enemy fire and shrapnel—Simoni sought to change that, and to build a cheap and effective way to counter drones.
Enter, Bullfrog™. Here’s how it works:
- The weapon uses AI and computer vision to identify and track targets (drones), then uses robotics to swing the gun around and fire.
- Rather than shooting the gun themselves, operators control the system from behind a screen.
- In tests, the gun is able to identify targets, swing around 180 degrees, and pick them out of the sky—all faster than a human could.
- The system is fairly inexpensive because it uses bullets rather than rockets or missiles, and can be deployed on a range of vehicles, from boats to cars.
In 2024, the company raised a $12M seed round led by David O. Sacks’ Craft Ventures fund. The company is taking a two-pronged approach to profitability—-it’s both trying to sell directly into the DoD and to autonomous vehicle companies that want to integrate the system into their drones.
“You can imagine an autonomous vehicle driving around out there, they need something to do, and so one of those things they can do is eliminate targets and threats,” Simoni said.
He said they have a few “deals in the works” with vehicle companies and are working to scale up production. Last week, the company shipped a Bullfrog™ to its first official customer from their facility in Austin.