ABSI Aerospace & Defense Hosts 'Hive Mind' Robotics Team for Hands-On Counter-Drone Experience

ABSI Aerospace & Defense Hosts 'Hive Mind' Robotics Team for Hands-On Counter-Drone Experience

Members of growingSTEMS Robotics Team 836A — known as "The Hive Mind" — visited ABSI Aerospace & Defense's facility in California, Maryland this month to see firsthand how the company manufactures expendable aerial target drones used by the U.S. military for counter-UAS training.

The Hollywood, Maryland-based team had just returned from the VEX IQ World Championship in St. Louis, where they finished 21st in their division.

ABSI's Aerial Targets Division Mass-Produces Expendable Drones

ABSI's Aerial Targets Division designs and manufactures affordable, threat-representative aerial targets for U.S. military units to engage during live-fire training exercises. The goal is to prepare operators for the increasingly common enemy drone threats encountered in overseas deployments and homeland security missions.

Founded in 2016 in California, Maryland, ABSI is a veteran-owned company specializing in unmanned systems development, test and evaluation, and threat replication.

Its product line spans Group 1 first-person view (FPV) swarm platforms to Group 3 long-range systems, all operated through a single common ground control system.

Under U.S. Department of Defense UAS classification standards:

• Group 1: Under 20 lbs (9 kg), operating below 1,200 ft AGL (366 m)
• Group 3: Up to 1,320 lbs (599 kg), operating up to 18,000 ft MSL (5,486 m)

This represents a broad threat spectrum. The ability to replicate these threats at low unit cost — allowing each target to be shot down without blowing a training budget — is ABSI's core competitive advantage.

All ABSI products are manufactured in the United States and comply with ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), Buy American Act requirements, and Blue List procurement standards, aligning with the Pentagon's increasingly strict domestic supply chain sourcing mandates.

Hive Mind Students Get Up Close With Real Counter-Drone Wreckage

Students posed for a photo with an ABSI project manager holding a recovered drone wing fragment from a real-world counter-UAS intercept. For a group of teenagers more accustomed to polished product renders during factory tours, seeing the physical aftermath of a kinetic engagement was a markedly different experience.

Most STEM field trips stop at finished products and animation walkthroughs. ABSI showed them physical evidence of what happens to their own systems after a kinetic intercept.

ABSI engineers walked team members through drone propulsion systems and advanced manufacturing processes. David Zyga of the Aerial Targets Division told BayNet: "We love having local youth come visit our company. For many youth, an interest in robotics can turn into a hobby, then an academic focus, and ultimately a career. It's important for them to see how continuing down that path can have a profound impact on national defense and global security."

Group 1 Through Group 3 Coverage Across the Full Threat Spectrum

ABSI's Aerial Targets Division positions itself as the only single-vendor provider capable of replicating the full modern UAS threat spectrum — from basic kinetic training to long-range one-way attack scenarios — mirroring what U.S. military operators are encountering in current overseas combat theaters. This market position directly addresses the threat evolution that U.S. operators have observed in Ukraine and the Red Sea over the past two years.

The threat range U.S. forces face runs from sub-$500 quadcopters carrying mortar warheads to military-grade loitering munitions capable of flying hundreds of miles. Conducting counter-UAS training with physical targets that match these threat profiles costs far less per engagement than firing interceptor missiles or shells — and that is the entire business logic behind expendable aerial targets.

ABSI does not publicly disclose unit pricing, but affordability is central to its sales proposition and is key to enabling the Pentagon to sustain high-tempo counter-drone training exercises. When the cost of each training intercept is kept within a manageable budget, exercise calendars stay full; otherwise, units quietly skip live-fire drills in favor of simulators.

Defense Talent Pipeline Takes Root With Middle School Robotics

According to Bay Net, The Hive Mind competed at the VEX IQ World Championship in St. Louis in April against 421 teams from more than 50 countries, finishing 21st in their division and missing the divisional finals by less than one point.

The team previously won third place in the skills competition at the Maryland State Championship and took home an "Innovate Award" for their Python programming work. This was their second consecutive World Championship qualification — the year before, they became the first middle school team in their region to earn a bid.

Four team members are now moving up to high school, where coursework will cover welding, circuit wiring, CAD, CNC machining, and 3D printing. Two remaining middle school members have already begun rebuilding the roster for the next season.

ABSI also runs internship and mentorship programs through the Patuxent Partnership and the DoD SkillBridge program, and notes that several interns have transitioned to full-time employment while completing their studies.

The trajectory — from VEX IQ at age 12, to a SkillBridge internship at 22, to an engineering role at ABSI in one's mid-20s — is precisely the kind of talent pipeline that defense workforce planners have been working to build since the unmanned systems talent shortage became acute after 2020.

DroneXL Editorial Perspective

Factory tours by defense drone companies are typically not much more than a press release. But when a company lets middle schoolers stand next to the wreckage of its own platform after it has been shot down by a U.S. military counter-drone weapon, the message is entirely different. It honestly shows what ABSI actually builds and what ultimately happens to it — a level of candor that deserves more credit than the standard sanitized school visit.

The aerial targets division exists because, before someone started mass-producing expendable platforms, the cost of training against realistic drone threats was simply unsustainable. Covering Group 1 through Group 3 with a single ground control system is a genuine operational efficiency advantage for training units that need to cycle operators across different threat tiers.

The bottleneck in counter-drone training has never been the kinetic systems themselves — it has always been having enough credible targets for operators to "re-learn" against. Visits like this plant the right seeds. The 11-year-old who touched that broken wing today may walk back into ABSI's facility as an engineer at 24. That is how a real talent pipeline gets built.

Image credit: ABSI Aerospace & Defense

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