The idea
Counter-UAS systems need something realistic to shoot at, and towing targets or flying manual FPV drones doesn’t scale. Skeet is a design program for expendable target drones that fly themselves: pre-briefed swarm behaviors, no control link (jamming is the test stimulus, so the target must survive it), and TSPI scoring data out the back so the defense system’s performance can actually be measured.
The controlling constraint is unit cost — these exist to be destroyed — which drives every decision toward printed structure, commodity electronics, and automated production.
The P1 baseline
The frozen first-platform spec (S5): a 5-inch PETG unibody quad, ~520 g, built around a SpeedyBee F405 running ArduPilot 4.6+, with an ESP32 DroneBridge MAVLink link for pre-flight configuration only. The airframe is parametric OpenSCAD — change a dimension and re-render the STLs.
Simulation first
A multi-vehicle SITL harness (skeet-sim) runs scripted scenarios with a
scenario engine, scoring, and viewers, including reinforcement-learning control
experiments. Custom Gazebo worlds are generated deterministically from seeded
Python so runs are reproducible.
Status
24 structured design documents across 10 workstreams — architecture, airframe, avionics, swarm C2, simulation, assembly automation, and the regulatory side (FAA, Remote ID, range safety). Simulation infrastructure is working; the next gate is first physical prototype hardware.