ABSI Hosts Hive Mind Robotics Team for Counter-UAS Tour

Members of growingSTEMS Robotics Team 836A, known as The Hive Mind, toured ABSI Aerospace and Defense in California, Maryland this month to see how the company builds the expendable unmanned targets the U.S. military uses to train against hostile drones.

The Hollywood, Maryland team had just returned from the VEX IQ World Championship in St. Louis, where it finished 21st in its division. I have covered ABSI’s Aerial Targets Division before in DroneXL’s reporting on the surge in counter-UAS training demand, so a middle school robotics team walking through that facility caught my eye for reasons that go past the field trip itself.

ABSI’s Aerial Targets Division Builds Expendable UAVs at Scale

The Aerial Targets Division designs and manufactures affordable threat-representative aerial targets that U.S. military units fire on during live training exercises to prepare operators for the hostile drone encounters they now expect to face overseas and on the homeland security side. ABSI was founded in 2016 in California, Maryland and operates as a veteran-led company focused on unmanned systems work, test and evaluation, and threat replication.

The product portfolio covers Group 1 first-person-view swarms through Group 3 long-range platforms, all operated from a single common ground control system.

In the Department of War’s UAS classification, Group 1 means under 20 pounds (9 kg) and under 1,200 feet (366 m) above ground level. Group 3 stretches to 1,320 pounds (599 kg) and 18,000 feet (5,486 m). That is a wide threat surface to replicate, and replicate cheaply enough that each target can be shot down without breaking a training budget.

ABSI products are manufactured in the United States and operate under ITAR, the Buy American Act, and Blue List requirements. That sourcing posture matters because the Department of War has been tightening procurement rules to keep drone hardware on a domestic supply chain.

The Hive Mind Saw Real Counter-UAS Wreckage Up Close

Students posed for a photo with an ABSI project manager who held a recovered UAV wing pulled from a successful counter-UAS engagement, putting actual battlefield aftermath in front of children who normally only see polished product renders on factory tours.

Most STEM site visits stop at finished hardware and animated diagrams. ABSI showed them the physical evidence of a kinetic intercept against one of their own systems.

ABSI engineers walked the team through UAV propulsion systems and advanced manufacturing processes. David Zyga of the Aerial Targets Division told The BayNet, “We enjoy hosting local youth for site visits.

For many of these adolescents, robotics will evolve from an interest to a hobby, to an education and ultimately to a career. It is important for them to see how continued pursuit of this field can result in a meaningful impact on national defense and global security.”

Simulators get you close to real combat. They never take you all the way. Letting these kids actually touch and feel a broken wing gives them something no clean training environment can deliver.

Group 1 Through Group 3 Targets Cover the Full Threat Spectrum

The Aerial Targets Division markets itself as the only single-vendor source covering the full range of modern UAS threat replication, running from foundational kinetic training through long-range one-way attack scenarios that mirror what U.S. forces have actually encountered in current operational theaters overseas. That positioning is a direct response to what American operators have watched the last two years in Ukraine and the Red Sea.

The threats those operators face span $500 quadcopters carrying mortar rounds and military-grade loitering munitions flying hundreds of miles. A C-UAS training program that uses live targets matched to those threat profiles costs less per engagement than the missiles or rounds expended against them. That math is the entire commercial logic of the expendable target business.

ABSI does not publish unit prices, but the affordability claim is central to its sales pitch and to the Pentagon’s appetite for sustained C-UAS exercise volume. When the cost of a single training intercept stays inside a credible budget line, the exercise calendar grows. When it does not, units quietly skip live runs and lean on simulation.

Defense Workforce Pipelines Start in Middle School Robotics

As The Bay Net reported, The Hive Mind competed in April at the VEX IQ World Championship in St. Louis, where the squad faced 421 teams from more than 50 countries and finished 21st in its division after missing the cut for Division Finals by less than a single point.

The team also took third in the Skills competition at the Maryland State Championship and earned the Innovate Award for its Python coding work. It was the second consecutive World Championship appearance for the squad after becoming the first local middle school team to qualify the prior year.

Four members are moving to high school, where the program advances into soldering, wiring, computer-aided design, CNC machining, and 3D printing. Two returning middle school members are already rebuilding the next roster.

ABSI has separately run intern and mentor programs through The Patuxent Partnership and the Department of Defense SkillBridge pipeline, and the company says several interns have returned as full employees while still finishing their degrees.

The pipeline that runs VEX IQ at age 12, a SkillBridge internship at age 22, and an ABSI engineering seat by the mid-twenties is what defense workforce planners have tried to build deliberately since the post-2020 talent crunch in unmanned systems.

Most of these pipelines fail because the bridge between school robotics and a clearance-eligible engineering job stays invisible to students until they have already picked another major.

DroneXL’s Take

A tour of a defense UAV company is normally a publicity item, but the calculus changes when the company stands middle school students next to a recovered wing from one of its own platforms killed in flight by U.S. counter-drone weapons. That is honest about what ABSI builds and what happens to it. I respect that more than the usual sanitized field trip.

The Aerial Targets Division business exists because the cost of practicing against real drone threats was unsustainable until somebody started building expendable platforms at scale. ABSI is not the only vendor in this space, but a single ground control system covering Group 1 through Group 3 is a real workflow advantage for training units that rotate operators across threat tiers.

I have covered enough C-UAS exercises in DroneXL’s reporting to know that the bottleneck is rarely the kinetic system. It is the supply of credible targets the operators have not already memorized.

This is the kind of visit that plants the seed. The 11-year-old who touched that broken wing today is the one who might walk through ABSI’s front door as an engineer at 24. That is how a pipeline actually gets built.

Photo credit: ABSI Aerospace & Defense