Miami-based autonomy company Hextronics introduced Eclipse, a vertically integrated drone dock and aircraft system, during an Exhibitor Showcase at Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas. Founder and CEO Curtis Lary walked the audience through the new hardware and software stack, framing it as the product of years of field testing across some of the harshest deployment environments in the industry.
Garage Startup Becomes Global Dock Supplier
Lary opened his remarks by explaining how early customers in industrial inspection kept running into the same operational bottleneck: drones needed a pilot on site to launch, land and recharge them. That customer feedback shaped the company’s founding premise. Hextronics built that box.
He traced Hextronics back to its earliest days, when he and a small group of high school interns built the company’s first product by hand. “We were riveting together our first product, the Global, in our garage,” Lary told the audience. They then shipped it worldwide directly from Lary’s driveway. “We were slapping labels on crates that we were giving to our UPS delivery driver on our driveway going to Saudi Arabia, to South Africa, to Ghana, to Norway, all across the world, just out of my garage,” he recalled.
Demand from larger industrial groups pushed the company to scale its hardware, which led to the Atlas dock for heavier aircraft and later a Universal system compatible with multiple drone platforms already in the market. Lary said Atlas has spent the past four years supplying industrial inspection programs, while the Universal line extended Hextronics’ charging and housing technology across a broader range of commercial airframes.
Engineering Through Real-World Conditions
Lary described the operational challenges that shaped the company’s engineering choices. Docks deployed on rooftops in Phoenix or in locations exposed to severe weather forced the team to solve for extreme heat, cold and mechanical wear across thousands of flight cycles. He noted that Hextronics has now passed half a million cycles across its drone stations, with a dock somewhere in its global network launching roughly every three minutes.
Beyond the physical environment, Lary pointed to a second, less predictable variable: regulation. He said the rules governing U.S. airspace change more frequently than the laws of physics his engineers had already learned to work around. That shifting regulatory landscape, including National Defense Authorization Act compliance requirements and the FAA’s expanding allowances for beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations, has driven what Lary called “a wave of iteration and innovation” across the drone industry, much of it originating from his own team.
Eclipse Brings Dock, Drone And Software Together
Lary revealed the company’s new Eclipse, which he referred to as “ a fully US-made, vertically integrated system spanning hardware and software.” He built the reveal around an eclipse metaphor, explaining how the platform aligns three components the way the sun, moon, and earth align during a natural eclipse: Hexair, Luna and Helios.
Hexair serves as the operational cockpit software. It lets users fly the drone and dock remotely and securely while managing captured data and mission logs. Lary emphasized that Hexair ships with an open API, to give customers access to full telemetry and command controls so they can build custom applications on top of the platform regardless of use case.
Luna is the physical dock, engineered around simplicity and reliability, with the roof functioning as essentially its only moving part. The station includes industrial-grade HVAC to keep it operational across harsh climates. Lary said the entire unit fits in a footprint comparable to a standard checked suitcase.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was the announcement about the Helios, the company’s new aircraft. It reportedly packs an industry-leading flight time of more than 50 minutes, an unobstructed range of six miles using both radio and cellular communications, and a top speed of 60 miles per hour. (Watch the Dawn of Autonomy 2025 episode where Lary appeared alongside TEAL Communications’ former CMO Robb Monkman to discuss how docked drone infrastructure and global connectivity work together to enable longer, more autonomous missions).
The payload, which Hextronics calls Trinity, pairs two 20-megapixel narrow and telephoto lenses capable of more than 80 times zoom. Trinity ships in two configurations: a T variant with 640-by-512 radiometric thermal imaging, and a V variant built around a low-light sensor for night vision. Lary added that the payload system is also compatible with the Hadron 640 sensor already used by many organizations in the field.
Why Alignment Matters For Operators
Lary returned repeatedly to the idea of alignment as the design philosophy behind Eclipse and its ecosystem. He said operators need the drone, the dock and the software to work as a single system, along with alignment across capability, scale, cost, payload, uptime and performance. Rather than treating hardware and software as separate purchasing decisions, Hextronics is positioning Eclipse as a single vertically integrated product built to remove the friction that comes from stitching together components from multiple vendors.
That posture carries particular weight for public safety agencies and critical infrastructure operators, audiences Lary singled out as core beneficiaries of dock-based drone infrastructure. Automated launch, data capture, and recharge cycles reduce the staffing burden that has historically limited how often and how widely agencies can fly.
Lary closed with a broader claim about where the industry is headed. He said drones have become one of the most impactful tools available for understanding the physical world, and that docked systems are turning individual aircraft into standing infrastructure rather than one-off tools. He ended with a question aimed squarely at the audience of operators and integrators in the room: “What’s in your world?”
That question doubles as an invitation. Hextronics is betting that once agencies and enterprises experience drone infrastructure that launches, flies, and recharges itself, they will stop viewing autonomy as a future capability and start treating it as a standing utility, as routine as electricity or connectivity.