The PDW story: From drone racing to presidential protection
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
From its roots in the world of competitive drone racing, to its current job of producing battle-ready drones and weapons systems for the defense industry, Performance Drone Works, or PDW, has focused on developing technologies that “that would never be able to fail,” according to co-founder Ryan Gury.
The Huntsville Alabama-based company, which specializes in the develop of high-performance, autonomous small UAVs for the military, public safety and commercial sectors, is working to produce the next generation of highly portable and attritable drones, which are rapidly becoming the dominant weapons on future battlefields, Gury said in an interview.
“We develop technologies that allow a single unit to deploy their own air support and do that in contested environments,” he said. “We believe that small attritable systems developed at scale are the key to delivering high performance for America’s future forces.”
In 2015, however, deploying drones as weapons was not as much of an issue for Gury. As the then chief technology officer of the fledgling Drone Racing League, he was more interested in developing sleek highly maneuverable first-person view (FPV) drones that could be piloted by young competitors through maze-like courses in televised races.
“The Drone Racing League was an industrial technology team built to facilitate a TV show,” he said. “We were working with industrial radios and robotics because we have to fulfill a live environment where we are on ESPN, Sky and NBC.”
Drones flown in the races had to be capable of flying multiple miles indoors and had to be agile and durable enough to take the brutal punishment of the event, yet inexpensive enough to be easily replaceable if the need arose, which it did on a regular basis. Because of the high attrition rate for racing drones, the DRL was required to supply around 500 UAVs for every racing event.
“We would have to include 20 concurrent links up at a time, and if we saw a failure across any of our competitions, our sport would cease to exist. So, we ended up developing our own radio systems and a large fleet of drones that could be destroyed,” he said.
“Out of that crucible came just a hardcore engineering group that would never be able to fail,” Gury said. Initially as a side venture, the DRL team began conducting training on the operation of small UAVs for the U.S. Department of Defense. Around seven years ago, the engineering team at the heart of the racing league moved from the center of the media universe in Manhattan, New York to the heart of the aviation and aerospace industry in Huntsville and PDW was born.
The transition from developing drones for show business to using that technology to aid the war fighters was a natural one for the company’s leadership team, most of whose members come from military backgrounds. “Our chief technology officer, our chief revenue officer, and our head of Advanced Missions Group R&D, are all special forces combat veterans,” Gury said.
PDW’s leaders believe that small drones will be the weapon of choice for militaries across the world for decades to come and that, just as with small arms and munitions, every single infantry soldier will have access to them. So, the company focuses on designing unmanned aerial systems “that are very affordable, not only for the war fighter, but for the taxpayer,” he said.
Ukraine conflict seen as model for future wars
Gury pointed to the Russia/Ukraine war, in which small attributable drone systems are responsible for causing 70% to 80% of all damage to enemy forces, as the model for future combat operations. PDW has adopted its own version of this paradigm in the development of its most significant products.
The C100, which Gury referred to as the company’s “mother ship,” is a quadcopter workhorse, that a soldier can carry in a knapsack. The UAV is adaptable for many military uses, such as conducting intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions, electronic warfare or extended mission-critical communications. It is fully NDAA-compliant and Blue UAS certified making it suitable for deployment by U.S forces.
“Most recently, we’re doing precision fire with a STAG-5 laser target designator with an F 35 and a cruise missile that allows someone to create a target from many miles away in a safe, concealed environment,” Gury said.
In addition, PDW recently released its newest weapon, the Attritable Multirotor FPV (AM-FPV), a dinner-plate sized drone, which is the first UAV developed as a combat system. “It’s very different from the rest, it goes together like a firearm,” Gury said.
The weapon, which utilizes advanced artificial intelligence software and which features automatic target recognition, is relatively inexpensive and easy to manufacture at scale. With a unit price of around $5,000, the AM-PPV exceeds the performance of much more expensive small weapons systems such as the Javelin advanced anti-tank weapon system or the Switchblade 600, a portable, tube-launched system.
“For a small fraction of the price, you can equip a lot more infantry with a lot more punch,” he said.
Gury said with the number of combat veterans in significant positions throughout the company, from the engineering department to the executive suite, PDW understands the needs of soldiers in the field.
“We’re not just a bunch of technology bros with good ideas,” he said. “We’re able to deliver on requirements that civilians cannot.”
The company is also working on developing the next generation of radio signals to enable secure communications with drones operating in highly contested environments.
“There’s a new style of radio necessary. We’ve been working on that for about 10 years,” Gury said. The genesis of this advanced signal technology lies in the design of systems used to operate FPV drones in the Drone Racing League days.
The company is partnering with the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) to design combat-ready products that are easy to manufacture, easy to scale and lethal in their application. “If you look at the war in Ukraine, that’s essentially what’s happening.”
According to the Kyiv Post, known as Ukraine’s Global Voice, the war-torn country is on track to manufacture between 2.5 million and 3 million military-use drones this year.
In an effort to copy the Ukrainian example of mass-producing highly effective, inexpensive UAS-based weapons systems, PDW recently opened up a 90,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Huntsville, which will enable the company to deliver around 500 C 100 motherships, and around 5,000 AM-FPV drones per month to its military customers.
“We’ve been developing these technologies for close to a decade. Ukraine just validates that,” Gury said.
In addition to the DoD contracts that PDW has secured, recently the U.S. Secret Service said it would adopt the use of its C 100 drones to take advantage of the UAVs’ critical threat-detection capabilities.
“The small drones can be deployed solo and can provide overwatch for high-risk VIPs,” Gury said. “The Secret Service drones also provide direct confluence to ground stations with law enforcement to ensure a proper response.”
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International
