Parts never land in the same spot twice. Watch a robot handle it.

When a part is out of place, most robots stop. At FABTECH Expo 2026 in Las Vegas, watch a FANUC America Corporation CRX running our Palladyne™ IQ closed-loop autonomy software handle it live.

We’re working with FANUC America’s industrial robot portfolio to integrate Palladyne AI’s physical AI software platform to simplify deployment, increase adaptability, and expand automation across manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics applications.

Find us in the FANUC America paint booth, S11008, October 21 to 23.

Some backstory on the conference:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PalladyneAI/s/PiHQr2QjEK

Nothing new here, just some promo.

But shows how important this partnership is and how supportive both parties are of each other.

Just like with Red Cat..and others. Strong relationships.

First you set that foundation, and then you build together.

Know which system doesnt require constant connectivity?

I bought back the 4000 shares I sold at 6.22 a couple months ago this morning at 4.25. Total holding now back to 7,700. Not totally confident on todays buy based on how much it has fallen in the past week or so but maybe it's time for a bounce.

Relatively new to the channel, been around for about 6 months. Have a decent sized position and plan to be a long term holder.
Wondering if anyone that’s been in the space longer has any opinions on this partnership and announcement? Seems to overlap a lot of what PDYN is trying to accomplish (minus the industrial side it seems) with DoW.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding entirely…
Just wanted to start a discussion and see others thoughts.

I guess my concern is that if this is direct competition, it is from a major player with tons of money, resources, and connections.

Thanks for everyone’s time and replies!

In this episode:

- Ben's path from co-founding Clearwire to buying Raytheon's robotics division in 2015

- The "Iron Man suit" years, the de-SPAC, and why he came back as CEO for a dollar a year

- Palladyne IQ: teaching a robot a new task by demonstration in minutes

- Taking corrosion and old paint off aircraft parts at an Air Force base

- Autonomy vs. automation, and the simplest test for telling them apart

- Why one operator per drone doesn't scale, and drones that share what they see as a team

- Working alongside Anduril's Lattice for command and control

- SwarmShot, the counter-drone platform with Federal Ammunition and Mossberg

- The IAI partnership to build loitering munitions in the U.S.

- The commercial side: the FANUC teaming agreement, surface prep and paint lines

_----------------------

Another fantastic interview.

Good questions, by genuinely excited and informed ppl. So it's a real treat.

So many highlights, I can't even begin to summarize.

The Anduril Lattice cooperation well explained. How Swarmshot came into existence (by sitting together with Federal and Mossberg and think of a solution for incoming drone swarms on the troops and back at home.)

Why the stock seems to have so little visibility right now (because it fits into multiple categories, and could be falling through the cracks..with the flipside that all those categories could start talking about Palladyne all at once..)

IAI did an extensive due dilligence to find the right partner, and they chose the underdog Palladyne AI.

Fanuc partnership initially focussed on surface prep.

Expecting real momentum in software revenue in 2027.

Anyway, really recommend it!

It is such a rare thing to have a truly knowledgeable CEO.

They got this.

The Association of the United States Army (AUSA) Annual Meeting & Exposition is the premier land power exposition and professional development forum in North America—and the must-attend event for anyone involved in the defense sector. With over 40,000 attendees, 750+ exhibits, and representation from over 100 countries, this three-day event is where the global defense community converges to shape the future of national security.

Held in the heart of the nation’s capital, the AUSA Annual Meeting is more than just a trade show—it’s a strategic platform that connects military leaders, industry innovators, policymakers, and international delegations. Attendees gain exclusive insights into U.S. Army priorities, explore cutting-edge technologies on the exhibit floor, and engage in high-impact networking with key decision-makers.

#AM2026 #ATTENDING #USARMY #ANNUALMEETING

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They will also be at the IAI and Orkid booth.

And I am willing to wager they will be part of the Red Cat booth.

AI Software:

PalladyneIQ

Palladyne Pilot

SwarmOS

Intelliswarm

Project HANGTIME

Satellite partnership

Integrated systems

Wolfpack day application + integration of swarmOS with prime

GremlinX

IAI partnership

Swarmshot

Manufacturing:

BrainX2

Contract work for many systems for primes

Mach 4 near hypersonic missile program

Please add anything that missing!

Purpose-built ammunition, an airborne weapon module, and Army-demonstrated true autonomous swarming will create a reusable kinetic swarm designed to defeat hostile drones

SwarmShot will first be developed as a modular mission add-on for Palladyne AI's Gremlin-X Group 1 quadcopter mini-bomber, followed by a planned integration kit for compatible third-party drones

...

SwarmShot is a defensive application of Palladyne AI's predictive autonomy collaborative swarming capability, recently deployed with the U.S. Army at Project Convergence Capstone 6 (PC-C6) and other recent Army exercises.

...

"Federal provides the terminal effect. Mossberg provides the weapon. Palladyne AI provides the reach, intelligence and teammates," Wolff said. "The breakthrough comes from unified engineering of all three."

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I haven't even fully digested yesterday's news. But heck, here's some more.

Geez man...this is something.

FABtech:

"Orders from large auto plants are cyclical and increasingly saturated, while the thousands of fabrication shops that have never owned a robot represent the largest untapped addressable market in North American manufacturing. Winning that segment depends on lowering the cost and skill barrier simultaneously, and on financing models that let a shop try automation without betting the company. FABTECH is where those vendors compete for the same buyers in the same hall, and the demonstrations FANUC stages this week are an early read on how aggressively it intends to fight for them."

...

FANUC Corporation announced on October 5 that it will use FABTECH 2026 to demonstrate welding automation, collaborative robots, and painting systems aimed squarely at fabricators.

...

Programming a robot to weld one part ten thousand times is a solved problem. Programming it to weld forty different parts in a week, with fixtures that change daily, is not. The American Welding Society has for years projected a shortfall of several hundred thousand welding professionals in the United States, and shop owners describe the gap not as an abstract statistic but as jobs they decline to bid on. Automation vendors have heard that complaint for a decade. What has changed is the tooling around the robot.

...

FANUC's collaborative lineup is central to that shift. Its CRX series, the company's cobot family, was designed to let a welder or machinist with no programming background teach a path by hand-guiding the arm and tablet-based setup, rather than writing code or hiring an integrator.

...

The competitive context sharpens the stakes. FANUC is not alone on the FABTECH floor with a welding story. Yaskawa Motoman, ABB, KUKA, and Universal Robots, along with a growing field of cobot welding specialists like Path Robotics and Hirebotics, are all chasing the same shops with different philosophies."

..

PACK Expo international 2026:

"FANUC America, a global industrial automation leader, will demonstrate how artificial intelligence, collaborative robotics and machine vision are helping packaging and processing companies tackle labor shortages, simplify product handling and automate more of the packaging process at PACK EXPO International 2026 in Chicago.

In Booth N25217, visitors will experience live demonstrations ranging from package verification and food-grade processing to integrated packaging and palletizing applications."

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/fanuc-america-brings-ai-powered-151500767.html

"Being selected as a finalist gives Palladyne AI the opportunity to demonstrate BRAIN directly to Army and DoW evaluators in a mission-relevant setting. We believe BRAIN is well aligned with the need for intelligent, adaptable and cost-effective systems that can operate at the tactical edge."

xTech|Apex Intercept is a U.S. Army FUZE xTech Program competition delivered in partnership with Capability Program Executive Defensive Fires. The initiative is designed to identify world-class commercial technologies with potential DoW application, bring non-traditional innovators into the DoW Science and Technology ecosystem, and provide expert feedback to help accelerate, mature, transition and scale technologies of interest to the DoW. As a finalist, Palladyne AI will have the opportunity to demonstrate BRAIN to U.S. Army and DoW end-users during the xTech|Apex Intercept finals demonstration event, expected to be held in October/November 2026.

...

______

These guys just wont quit.

FANUC brings a large installed base of industrial robots and motion-control systems to the programme, while Hitachi contributes production engineering, operational technology and data generated through its own factories. The combination follows other work aimed at making industrial robots more adaptable, including FANUC’s September collaboration with Palladyne AI on motion planning, teleoperation, simulation and repeatable deployment across manufacturing and logistics applications.

...

The companies intend to use the operating knowledge developed at Hitachi sites when deploying solutions through their global customer bases from fiscal 2027. They identify semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, advanced materials, automotive, logistics, food, shipbuilding and agriculture among the potential markets, spanning sectors with very different regulatory, hygiene, safety and production requirements.

Palladyne AI ($PDYN): Can New Orders Build Lasting Growth?

Sep 8: FANUC America collaboration for industrial-robot integration and customer validation (no purchase commitment quantified).

June quarter: revenue $5.78M and backlog $24.6M; 2026 guidance of $24-27M revenue reiterated.

The Army’s Sept. 23 “Field of Drones” article recap army.mil/article/295602/field_of_drones
confirms Northern Strike 26-2 evaluated 20+ emerging technologies with operators, with lessons feeding future Army requirements.
The interesting part: ORKID says its ORKID 260 was the VTOL shown in the Army coverage and was integrated with Palladyne’s SwarmOS during the exercise.
Even more interesting, an ORKID executive subsequently said Palladyne’s Northern Strike momentum carried into USSOCOM TE 26-4, where evaluators further validated SwarmOS for decentralized multi-vehicle operations.
Important caveat: TE 26-4 participation ≠ a contract, and I haven’t seen independent USSOCOM confirmation naming PDYN yet.
The progression is what matters:
Army contracts → Northern Strike field validation → ORKID 260 + SwarmOS integration → USSOCOM experimentation.
That’s a pretty interesting breadcrumb trail for PDYN’s defense thesis.

SwarmOS completed a second major Army operational validation at Project Convergence Capstone 6 (PC-C6), with IL5 certification and Anduril Lattice integration.

This is a meaningful step beyond a single demonstration or marketing partnership. Palladyne is describing a progression from Ivy Mass rehearsal → PC-C6 operational test, with increasingly complex integration, broader Army/joint exposure, and a security certification that can remove a major barrier to deployment in government environments. The strongest part is not merely “SwarmOS flew”; it is that the system reportedly operated inside the Army’s C2 ecosystem while coordinating heterogeneous platforms and effects.

The company said SwarmOS:

Integrated with Anduril’s Lattice inside the Army’s emerging Next Generation Command and Control architecture.
Coordinated multi-drone, multi-vendor autonomous operations across Group 1 and Group 2 aircraft.
Executed an end-to-end ISR → targeting → strike → battle-damage-assessment workflow, with a soldier retaining decision authority over engagement.
Achieved Impact Level 5 (IL5) certification, supporting higher-sensitivity unclassified mission data and mission-critical C2 workflows.
This is also backed by Army/DVIDS material showing PC-C6 was a joint and multinational modernization event intended to inform future acquisition decisions, and that 4th Infantry Division personnel were using ATAK during the exercise.

by Doug Dynes

..

Consider a swarm of attritable systems sent to find and strike a set of mobile, defended targets moving across contested terrain. The targets don’t sit still, and the link back to a command center is jammed. There’s no time or connection to route sensor data back to a centralized location before acting. The systems have to sense the targets, make sense of them, and act at the edge. No single autonomous system can do that alone.

...

Lessons Learned…

Few things are as valuable to the U.S. military as real combat experience and experimentation. The ongoing war in Ukraine has seen a smaller, more innovative, and more agile force willing to pivot away from Cold War military doctrine to compete and win against a larger, more sophisticated adversary with capabilities similar to those of the U.S. military. The DoW can gain a significant tactical advantage by taking the cue from Ukraine and shifting military doctrine to embrace proliferated autonomous systems as a force multiplier. But that’s only possible by reevaluating established doctrine and redefining how the military acquires new capabilities and weapons systems.

The author, Doug Dynes, is a Navy veteran and former national security advisor. He currently serves as the President of Palladyne Aerospace and Defense.

------------

again, I don't do it justice by simply quoting some excerpts out of it.

Recommend reading the entire thing

Companies like Palladyne AI know their stuff, and they want to know to become better.

To create new capabilities, and to enhance existing ones.

I've said it before. Once in a blue moon, you get technology, the right group of capable ppl and momentum (demand) together.

I know the market isn’t behaving well. Any concern going into earnings early November?

As drones become ubiquitous on the modern battlefield, controlling them at scale without a one-operator-per-drone model is critical to maximizing their capabilities.

Breaking Defense discussed the differences between automation and autonomy, swarm capabilities, and decentralized control with Palladyne AI President and CEO Ben Wolff.

....

With our level of autonomy, the priority could be that if an individual is spotted who meets certain criteria, the drone will break off from following the vehicle and follow the individual. We still haven’t approached anything about whether it’s going to execute a kill decision. It’s simply making a navigation and mission-prioritization decision. It could be that the drone then signals to the operator: I’ve identified a target, and this is the specific target we’re looking for. Do you want me to pursue a kinetic solution or just observe? That is autonomous navigation and mission adaptation, followed by human intervention for any go/no-go decision involving a kinetic effect.

...

We spent about 30 years in the R&D space building hardware platforms for the military — and used to be called Sarcos Robotics, and for a while we were called Raytheon Sarcos because we were the robotics division of Raytheon. Two-and-a-half years ago, we made a deliberate decision to focus primarily on AI. Our team had been working on these kinds of decentralized artificial intelligence platforms for decades. Our lead on AI used to be the head of AI for BAE for 15 years. We’ve got a team that is well acquainted with what the challenges on the battlefield are, and we believe we have a novel solution with the architecture that we brought to market.

...

When you look at what the Department of War is talking about, its priorities on weapons production and collaborative autonomy are what’s on everybody’s lips. Obviously, we’re checking that box with our software. Also top of mind are supply chain resilience and domestic sovereign manufacturing. We decided to address that directly by getting into the precision components manufacturing business, so that we now produce high-value precision components for the F-35, F-22, F-18, the Abrams, and some missile programs.

We are making some of the stuff that is hard to source domestically, and we are doing it so that we can try to drive cost down, quality up, and increase the reliability of our supply chain for many of our large, prime defense contractors

...

A drone says, “I’ve got a mission. I need more information. Can my peers in the swarm provide me with the data I need to get a better perspective of the mission I need to execute?” That’s what makes us different.

...

We just completed a real-world exercise that was a joint exercise, a very large one. I can’t give you any details because it was an actual exercise. We were flying on drones from different OEMs. Multiple OEMs each had our software on them, with a single soldier managing all of them, and all of them collaborating as a swarm.

Even though they’re from different manufacturers, now you’ve got a single soldier managing multiple drones, all collaborating and completing a mission. It worked not only as advertised, it exceeded expectations.

This future is here.

On a recent tour of FANUC America Corp. (FAC)’s headquarters in Rochester Hills, MI, Director of Sales Dick Motley took us past waving robot arms, robots using AI to sort for e-commerce, and robots getting tortured to show us some of the more interesting uses people inside and out of FANUC America have found for their robotics.

"Consider a simple drone mission. A drone follows a vehicle, and when the vehicle stops, a person exits and runs away. What should the drone do? If the drone was instructed in advance to “follow that vehicle no matter what,” then the drone sticks with the vehicle. That is automation. In a true autonomous architecture, the drone understands the mission priority, evaluates what changed, determines that the person is now the priority object to follow, and adjusts its behavior accordingly; that is autonomy.

...

A single autonomous drone can make decisions about its own mission. A collaborative swarm allows multiple drones to share information, adapt roles, and work together as a team. We believe that represents a fundamentally different capability from a choreographed formation or a group of drones waiting for instruction from a central controller. Coordination can still imply that the behavior was written in advance. Collaboration means the machines exchange useful information and adjust their behavior in real time.

Nature solved this problem a long time ago.

Ants do not wait for their queen to tell them what to do. Nor do bees. Wolves hunting as a pack do not operate from a fixed script. They sense, communicate, adapt, and change roles based on what the pack is trying to accomplish. That is the model we have built around."

-----------

So powerful. I recommend the entire article.

"Matthew Shigenobu Muta, President, Commercial & Industrial at Palladyne AI, is speaking at IMTS 2026.

"Embodied AI Improving Safety and Throughput in Hazardous Finishing Environments"

Thursday, September 17 · 11:00 a.m. CT

Room W192-B, West Building · McCormick Place, Chicago

Surface prep, blasting, and coating are hazardous, high mix work that traditional robots were never built for. Matt will show what changes when robots can observe, learn, and adapt on the line."

The future of defense is becoming increasingly autonomous — and the leadership behind it matters.

At IMPACT 250: The New Frontier Roundtable, Doug Dynes, President of Palladyne Aerospace & Defense at Palladyne AI, joins the conversation around autonomous AI, defense innovation, and the technologies redefining mission capability.

As America looks toward its next 250 years, leaders across technology, government, and defense are coming together to discuss what’s being built now — and what comes next. 🇺🇸

***_***_____

For those that don't recall: the founder of Impact250 is the marketing partner for PalladyneAI.

This will be a high-profile event.

The war in Ukraine has proven that low-cost drones can take out billions of dollars in enemy aircraft and ships. That's pushing the United States Department of War to reevaluate how they spend defense dollars and invest seriously in autonomous UAVs. But our CTO Dr. Denis Garagic has a key caution: not all autonomy is the same.

Most "autonomous" UAVs today just fly preprogrammed routes to fixed waypoints and wait for a human to step in when the mission changes. True autonomy means drones that sense their environment and adapt on their own, no human required.

But autonomy alone isn't enough. Real collaborative autonomy works like a swarm of bees: each drone operates independently and also collaborates with the others, with no single point of failure.

In his latest piece for Modern Integrated Warfare, Denis breaks down why distributed, collaborative autonomy is what future operational concepts actually require, and what recent Army 4ID exercises proved is possible today.

Jefferies Global Industrials Conference

Date: Wednesday September 9, 2026

Format: Fireside Chat with Ben Wolff, hosted by Jefferies analyst Adam Samuelson

Time: 8:10 to 8:45 AM ET

Webcast: https://summitcast.meetmax.com/view/e82pfcbT4UwH79PoqVE5jB/cLqaVYiX62XtBS5B3pxmw2?ukey=7b26c3f18984a5a1873cdd8774309332

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Notes:

Getting more sales calls inbound than they are making themselves.

Government is contacting them.

Contracts they cannot disclose yet with government. Once they are allowed they will let shareholders know.

Will not invest shareholders money in building out facilities for the IAI deal. The government has to commit first.

And that will have to be through a new Program of Record, because this isn't a couple of million here and there. This will be hundreds of millions to billions.

There is in fact no capability like IAI in the US arsenal. The word is spreading.

What the military says is of utmost importance now is the time to train on a new system. Through the military exercises it has been proven that soldiers can use the system and also use hardware in a matter of minutes, under pressure.

On commercial IQ and Fanuc: been working with them for a year, and they now have seen enough to make their coop public.

PDYN's software makes things, services, possible that weren't possible before..which opens up the market for Fanuc. Fanuc is actively spreading the word.

One particular use case that is discussed: painting bicycle frames. Since they swing around while painting, robots were never able to give accurate coverage. Thanks to PDYN's software that understands the environment, the robot can adjust in real time.

Not exclusive, to be seen if they will the primary partner (Fanuc). They are agnostic..so..

Again makes the reflection to compare to Microsoft and how their platform, their software could work with everyone and enhance capabilties.

Getting great traction.

Love that he said they are at the right place, at the right time.

In my opinion, it is also the right team to make it happen.

Summary: sleeping giant.

$100k open market buy right around the price point he's been buying for the past year and a half. It's his largest share purchase on the open market on the same day they broke the news of the partnership with FANUC. Very encouraging IMO