AeroVironment Acquires Planck Aerosystems to Advance Unmanned Aircraft
August 17, 2022
AeroVironment, which develops intelligent, multi-domain robotic systems, has announced it acquired Planck Aerosystems, which develops advanced unmanned aircraft navigation solutions. The acquisition aims to accelerate AeroVironment’s development of advanced autonomy capabilities, the company said. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Founded in 2014, San Diego-based Planck has worked closely with customers from the U.S. Department of Defense, security agencies, allied governments and offshore industries to develop customer-centric unmanned aircraft solutions. Planck’s products include embedded technologies and fully integrated unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), as well as providing technical expertise in UAS guidance and navigation, autonomy and artificial intelligence.
Planck will be acquired by AeroVironment’s Petaluma-based medium unmanned aircraft systems (MUAS) business segment to focus on integrating its flight autonomy solutions, such as ACE (Autonomous Control Engine), into AeroVironment’s offerings to enable safe, autonomous takeoff and landing from moving platforms on land or at sea in GPS-denied environments. Other solutions include AVEM, a fully integrated mobile tethered sensor platform designed for persistent autonomous operation from moving vehicles and vessels in any environment, and a suite of machine-learning object detection and tracking systems that are customized for specific end-user needs.
“Planck has a compelling product and technology roadmap with valuable capabilities that we plan to deploy and integrate with AeroVironment’s existing portfolio of intelligent, multi-domain robotic systems,” said Wahid Nawabi, chairman, president and CEO of AeroVironment. “The Planck team has developed advanced unmanned autonomy and navigation solutions for various defense and commercial customers and by working together, we believe we offer more compelling and differentiated solutions to our customers moving forward.”
“AeroVironment’s heritage of creating innovative solutions to meet customer needs is an ideal fit for the Planck team,” said Josh Wells, CEO of Planck. “We couldn’t be more excited about joining forces with AeroVironment to deliver innovative, multi-domain unmanned systems to the next generation of U.S. and allied warfighters. AeroVironment’s reach, technical capabilities and portfolio of unmanned systems will enable the Planck team to scale our products to more customers, and to provide better solutions in less time.”
For more details on AeroVironment, visit its website here.
