Autonomous strike aircraft created in just 71 days

Divergent Technologies, which has created the Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS), the world’s first end-to-end software-hardware production system for industrial digital manufacturing, had announced a partnership with the defence manufacturing company Mach Industries. The partnership will deliver Venom, a prototype flight demonstration aircraft showing ‘hardware development at software speed’.

Mach Industries established the baseline requirements and architecture by leveraging the avionics and simulation from existing, flight-proven tech stacks with a modular, open-systems architecture, so as to accelerate development from concept to flight. Divergent executed the digital design and 3-D print of the Venom structure, including wings, fuselage, skins, and control surfaces as monolithic assemblies rather than conventional multi-part builds.

Lukas Czinger, Divergent’s co-founder and CEO, said: “Going from inception to flight in 71 days is a clear demonstration of what is possible when Divergent’s Adaptive Production System is used from day one. Most importantly, Divergent will drive the rapid scale-up of this system, producing thousands of airframes annually. Partnering with Mach has been an immediate win and reflects two mission-aligned, innovative companies executing at maximum pace.”

Rapid scale-up
He continued: “Enabled by Divergent’s DAPS, we collapsed traditional multi-hundred-part assemblies into unified additively manufactured structures to accelerate production, achieve superior mass and performance, and dramatically reduce overall part count.”

Ethan Thornton, Mach’s founder and CEO, added: “Over the last 18 months Mach has taken four products from concept to flight test through rapid iteration, and Divergent’s adaptive tech stack has been instrumental in accelerating that iteration. Mach’s selection for a production contract is the first of many opportunities to show not only speed to prototype, but speed to scaled manufacturing.

“By leveraging a common simulation and controls foundation, Mach Industries can support high-fidelity prototyping and adaptable iteration across hardware and software. Together, Divergent and Mach Industries are demonstrating a new model for autonomous defence systems, replacing tooling heavy aerospace processes with a software-defined manufacturing approach that enables rapid iteration, scalable production, and speed to field.”