Reach Power and Gambit announced on June 9 that they had been selected for OECIF funding to combine wireless power transfer with AI-enabled autonomy, with the goal of drone swarms that intelligently manage their own energy and stay deployed indefinitely.
The energy problem is the mission problem
Small drone endurance is measured in tens of minutes. Every operational plan built around them is really a plan about batteries: how many, who carries them, who swaps them, and what the mission does during the gap.
Beaming power to aircraft in flight removes the gap. Reach has already demonstrated the hardware side, using a mesh network of four transmitters to charge a UAV mid-flight and, in a separate Air Force Research Laboratory program, building the first wireless power relay nodes, which extend beaming around obstacles and over longer distances.
What Gambit adds
The autonomy layer is the part that has been missing. A swarm drawing from a shared, limited power beam has to decide continuously which aircraft gets charged, in what order, and which ones can afford to run low while covering a sector.
That is a scheduling problem under contention, and it does not have a hand-written answer. It is exactly the kind of thing you hand to a policy trained on the actual mission. Pairing the beam with the brain is the whole point of the award.
Where this fits
This is the first of two Reach awards this summer. In August the company followed with an AFWERX STTR for perched drones that recharge on a surface rather than in the air. Both target persistence. They just disagree about whether the aircraft should be moving while it drinks.
Defense funding has been the on-ramp for wireless power all year, and it is not hard to see why. The military has a large number of places where running a cable is impossible and sending a person is dangerous. That is a narrow market, but it pays, and it is the market that buys down cost for everyone else.