What happens when one of the world’s leading minds in autonomy decides to take his research out of the lab and into the fight? This week on the Dawn of Autonomy podcast, we find out. “Tech Leaders” month, sponsored by TruWeather Solutions, continues with Dr. Sertac Karaman, Founder of Tycho.AI and Director of MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), whose small MIT spinout is building the next generation of GPS-denied autonomous solutions for the most contested environments on the battlefield.
Sertac Karaman has spent his career at the forefront of robotics and autonomy research, leading one of MIT’s most consequential labs and translating cutting-edge science into operational technology. With Tycho.AI, he is taking on one of the hardest problems in modern defense tech: building autonomous systems that can navigate, perceive, and act intelligently when GPS is jammed, comms are degraded, and the world is at its most complex. Tycho.AI’s Voyager autonomy stack combines multi-modal sensing with advanced machine learning to deliver edge-executable intelligence that doesn’t depend on remote control or persistent connectivity, a capability the U.S. military increasingly recognizes as foundational to the next era of unmanned operations.
In this episode, Sertac unveils Halley, Tycho.AI’s high-speed Group 1 VTOL platform, officially rolled out at SOF Week 2026 and engineered for counter-UAS intercept, one-way attack, ISR, and multi-agent swarming missions. At just 5.2 pounds, with foldable wings, zero-tool assembly, and a tailsitter airframe that transitions seamlessly from hover to high-speed dash, Halley represents a strategic shift to an entirely new category of small, fast, agile UAS. Sertac shares why and how the team developed Halley, the demand signal Tycho.AI is seeing from customers for small, fast drones that can effectively intercept threats, and details from Halley’s recent success at the T-REX 26-2 event at Camp Atterbury.
Tune in to hear how Tycho.AI is reshaping battlefield autonomy from MIT lab bench to tactical edge, what it actually takes to build a low-SWaP autonomy stack that performs in denied and contested environments, and why the convergence of high-speed airframes and edge AI is rewriting what small unmanned systems can do.
