About
Building cheap autonomous interceptors—starting on the bench.
Vandaris Defense is an early-stage research effort in Ithaca, New York, building attritable kinetic interceptors guided by onboard vision. Work is simulation and bench first; nothing is field-deployed.
How we work
Technical execution in-house: vision pipeline, airframe CAD/FEA, radar architecture, and this site. Simulation and bench hardware first—ship proof before claiming flight.
- —Research focus on autonomy, aerodynamics, and simulation—not slideware.
- —Integrated study: guidance software and notional airframe models developed together in sim.
- —Hardware-in-the-loop IBVS simulator tunes gains entirely within simulation workflows.
Where things stand
Two parallel tracks: Scythe for guidance and Sprinter for high-speed aerodynamics, converging for an outdoor / range-ready closed-loop demo before Summer 2027. Current status of each milestone is on the development timeline.
Research scope
Advance cost-asymmetric autonomy through simulation-first research.
Our mission is to build attritable interceptors that defeat cheap UAS (and detectable ground targets) with onboard vision—starting with honest bench and simulation work, not a slide deck.
Research context
Autonomy cost curves are increasingly studied in simulation: low-cost UAS scenarios stress legacy control architectures, motivating unified guidance research across scenario classes.
Vandaris studies one autonomous guidance stack for that problem—evaluated through simulation and HITL validation, not field deployment.
Experimental scenarios
Simulated autonomous tracking against aerial and ground-target trajectories—studied as closed-loop control problems in HITL environments.
Counter-UAS
Autonomous tracking guidance for UAS scenarios—validated in HITL simulation only.
Ground-target tracking
Closed-loop guidance concepts for mobile ground-target trajectories in simulation.
Current experimental focus
Closed-loop autonomous guidance in HITL simulation—counter-UAS and ground-target profiles. Then reliability metrics in sim and documentation for academic publication.
Status
Early-stage research on the V-1 vision-guided interceptor. Public pages document real bench and simulation work—not field-deployed systems.