Palladyne AI, a U.S.-based defense and industrial technology company delivering embodied AI-powered collaborative autonomy solutions, and NORDA Dynamics (NORDA), a Ukrainian-Estonian developer of a drone autonomy ecosystem proven in active combat, today announced a collaboration to integrate Palladyne AI’s SwarmOS decentralized, collaborative autonomy platform with the Underdog Autonomy Module, NORDA’s autonomous terminal guidance product for next-generation unmanned swarm operations.
Founded in 2024, NORDA Dynamics is a Ukrainian-Estonian defense-tech company with its engineering and operations center in Lviv, Ukraine. NORDA builds its products on Underdog CORE, an AI brain that gives drones GNSS-denied navigation, target recognition, terminal guidance, and onboard decision-making, enabling them to complete missions without GPS, without communications, and amid active electronic warfare, across strike and interception roles. These systems are among the most widely deployed today in active combat zones: integrated with dozens of drone manufacturers in Ukraine and tested in tens of thousands of real-world engagements on one of the world’s most electronically contested battlefields. That record is what NORDA brings to the collaboration.
The two companies' technologies are complementary, addressing different phases of the same mission. SwarmOS provides the swarm intelligence layer: distributed, edge-based perception and collaboration that lets multiple unmanned platforms autonomously detect, classify, assign, and maintain persistent tracking of multiple moving or stationary targets at once. Underdog takes over for the final phase – short-range precision pursuit and engagement of each assigned target, even when jamming has disrupted communications with the UAV. Each system is designed to operate independently within its own phase of the mission. When integrated together, SwarmOS’ persistent, multi-target tracking can feed real-time target state data directly into NORDA’s terminal guidance, enabling the combined system to autonomously find, fix, track, assign, pursue and guide capability against multiple simultaneous targets, with decentralized coordination and minimal operator workload. Throughout the mission, engagement decisions remain subject to human-on-the-loop oversight.
The collaboration pairs two complementary autonomy ecosystems: SwarmOS extends its platform-agnostic swarming architecture into autonomous terminal guidance for counter-unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS), while the NORDA Ecosystem gains a collaborative, multi-target coordination layer for its combat-proven autonomy products. Under the collaboration and subject to any necessary governmental approvals, the companies plan to integrate their technologies onto one or more unmanned platforms and jointly demonstrate the combined system.
