A Swedish startup just showed a bomb-carrying drone that finds, ranks, and hits its own target without a pilot or a radio link.
Scaleout Systems ran the demo with BAE Systems Bofors as part of the Affordable Loitering Modular Ammunition program. During BAE's Winter Demo 2026, the drone spent about 200 seconds scanning and geolocating potential targets, ranked an armored engineering vehicle as the top priority, then flew to it and dropped an explosive, all in under 320 seconds. A human could press a button to start the mission and stayed on hand as a failsafe, but nothing else required manual input. The onboard computer vision runs on a Jetson Orin Nano, the same low-cost board hobbyists can buy, and in an earlier Arctic test near Karlskoga it processed the YOLOv8 Nano model at 30 frames per second with about 30 milliseconds of latency, in the snow, at minus 18 degrees Celsius.
What makes this notable isn't the explosive, it's the missing radio. Most armed drones in active use, including the ones flying over Ukraine, depend on a live operator link that jamming can sever. Scaleout's pitch is a drone that needs no connection at all once launched, which solves the electronic-warfare problem but sidesteps the harder question of who is accountable when the machine picks the target.
A UN expert group has already concluded that human judgment is required to keep autonomous weapons compliant with the laws of war, and that finding goes to Geneva for review in November. Scaleout's own demos are still funded by a 100,000-euro NATO DIANA grant, not a procurement contract, so read the footage as a proof of concept, not a fielded weapon, at least for now.