ROBBRIEF
VAMPIRE, the counter drone weapons kit the U.S. Army is buying, will now run Shield AI's camera only drone tracking software, moving the technology from a sensor demo into fielded kit.
L3Harris has licensed Shield AI's Tracker C-UAS software to run on its VAMPIRE counter-drone weapons platform, the two companies said.
The deal moves Shield AI's passive, electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) drone-tracking software onto a fielded weapons system for the first time. Tracker C-UAS uses proprietary computer vision to spot, classify, and track drones in camera video without radar or radio emissions, so operators can detect threats without broadcasting their own position. L3Harris Targeting & Sensor Systems president Tony Calderon framed the integration as a passive, AI-enabled precision capability for the drone threat, and Shield AI Hivemind senior vice president Christian Gutierrez cast it as the natural next step from earlier sensor demonstrations.
VAMPIRE, a self-contained, vehicle- or vessel-mounted precision-strike kit the U.S. Army has been buying since 2025, is L3Harris's primary counter-drone weapons platform. The integration builds on a prior demo that paired the same Shield AI software with L3Harris's WESCAM MX-Series sensor turrets to detect multiple drone classes at ranges the companies said exceeded existing systems.
Shield AI is making the software licensable to other platforms, a sign it wants to be the AI detection layer underneath more than one counter-drone kit. Range, weather performance, and clutter behavior, the limits neither press release addresses, are the open questions for whether the radar-free approach holds up at scale.