U.S. defense manufacturer Machina Labs has been selected by the Department of War to develop and qualify metal airframes for LUCAS-class attack drones and to deploy two expeditionary robotic factories. The effort is part of the Department of War's Organic Industrial Base Modernization Challenge, and it has been reported as an 18-month, $9 million pilot. The factories, called Edge Factories, are containerized robotic manufacturing systems built to make UAV airframes closer to where they are needed. The initial program will first focus on developing and qualifying the airframe, and only then will the two pilot factories be deployed.

Machina says the speed is the real headline. According to the company, traditional manufacturing can take up to 56 weeks to get certain airframe components, while its robotic production technology aims to deliver parts within days. The system uses robotic forming to build metal structures directly from digital designs, without conventional dies or hard tooling. The company has also floated a target of about $15,000 per drone and the possibility of scaling up over time, but those are company projections that the pilot still has to prove. What remains unclear is how many airframes the factories could actually produce and where the two units would be sent.