Asylon Awarded Phase III U.S. Air Force Contract for Autonomous Aircraft Inspection

Asylon, a leading provider of autonomous robotic platforms for physical operations and a Veteran Ventures Capital portfolio company, has been awarded a Phase III contract by the Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex (WR-ALC) to advance the development, integration, and on-site demonstration of its Multi-modal Autonomous Robotics for Inspection of Aircraft (MARIA) system.

The $2.34M SBIR Phase III award marks a significant milestone in bringing autonomous, repeatable, and unattended general visual inspection (GVI) capabilities to Department of the Air Force airframes.

System Architecture

Under the contract, Asylon will deploy and integrate its complementary air and ground robotic platforms - the Guardian sUAS and DroneDog Q-UGV - together with its Range autonomy stack and DroneIQ command-and-control and data visualization infrastructure. The combined system performs coordinated, autonomous inspections of aircraft and delivers inspection results to maintainers through a single, intuitive operational interface.

Operational Impact

The MARIA system directly supports the Air Force's mission to modernize and accelerate aircraft sustainment operations. It will increase inspection speeds and improve consistency of manual tasks that are often labor-constrained and present high safety risks. Aircraft maintainers at WR-ALC will benefit from DroneIQ's enhanced decision-making tools, including collated imagery, LIDAR/point-cloud data, telemetry, and metadata delivered via 2D inspection workflows and 3D/digital-twin views.

This Phase III award deepens Asylon's partnership with the Air Force and establishes a flagship deployment of MARIA at a premier sustainment installation. The deployment creates a proven pathway for broader autonomous aircraft inspection capabilities across the defense and sustainment markets.

"We are honored to continue our partnership with the Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex on the MARIA system. This award reflects the Air Force's confidence in our autonomous air and ground robotics platforms, already deployed in active security operations, and their trust in us to extend that capability into aircraft inspections that are faster, safer, and more consistent." - Anthony McCarty, Senior Vice President of Government, Asylon

Asylon has completed over 350,000 autonomous missions across its security and inspection platforms.