RQ-28A

The RQ-28A is the US Army’s official designation for Skydio ’s X2D quadcopter, the small unmanned aircraft selected in 2022 to fill the service’s Short Range Reconnaissance requirement. Built around a folding, backpack-portable airframe weighing roughly 1.3 kg, it is the standard squad-level ISR asset issued to platoon and company-sized US Army units, replacing earlier hand-launched systems such as the RQ-11 Raven for that role. The aircraft entered fielding through the Army’s Programme Executive Office for Aviation, which framed SRR as a way to put a rifle-squad-organic eye in the sky into every infantry platoon.

The system’s defining feature is its autonomy stack. Six navigation cameras feed Skydio’s onboard computer-vision pipeline, the same software lineage the company developed for its consumer enterprise drones, allowing the RQ-28A to fly through cluttered terrain — woodlands, urban interiors, building stairwells — without GPS and without active piloting. An operator typically designates a subject, a waypoint, or an area, and the aircraft handles obstacle avoidance and path planning on its own. The payload is a dual EO/IR gimbal capable of daylight 4K imagery and a longwave infrared channel for night work, streamed back over an encrypted datalink to a tablet-based ground controller. Flight endurance sits around 35 minutes, with line-of-sight range of several kilometres in clean conditions.

The Army’s Tranche 1 award covered an initial production run worth roughly $20.2 million, with deliveries running through 2023 and 2024. The RQ-28A appears on the Defense Innovation Unit’s Blue UAS list — the cleared roster of US-component, NDAA-compliant small drones — which has driven adoption beyond the original Army programme into the Air Force, Marine Corps, and a long list of federal and state agencies. Ukrainian forces have also operated Skydio platforms in combat against Russian units, where the X2D family’s GPS-denied flight has been used to navigate inside buildings and under tree cover where Russian electronic warfare jams conventional consumer drones.

Skydio has since developed the heavier, longer-endurance X10D as a successor, and that platform won the Army’s Tranche 2 of the SRR programme in 2024. The RQ-28A is expected to remain in service alongside the X10D rather than be retired immediately, with the two systems covering different parts of the squad-and-platoon ISR envelope. Within the broader small-UAS field, the aircraft sits at the autonomy-heavy end of the market, distinguishing itself less by range or payload than by what it can fly into without a skilled pilot on the sticks.