Sunset Research and Development
Autonomous edge-AI detection drones for civilian and non-lethal training use: they spot people, animals and vehicles on board and carry no payload.
Sunset Research and Development is a Florida drone company started in 2026. It builds small autonomous aircraft that detect and classify people, animals and vehicles on board, without sending video off the airframe.
The rule that shapes everything is sensing, never striking. The platforms carry no payload, mount no weapons and are built for monitoring and situational awareness only; any task that crosses that line stops. Flights are daytime, within line of sight, never over people or moving vehicles, under a licensed Part 107 remote pilot.
The hardware is a Raspberry Pi 5 with a Hailo-8L accelerator running the detection models, ArduPilot on a Pixhawk 6C for flight, and airframes printed in-house: the 4Quad, a 5-inch quadcopter heading for its bench test and first hover; the Harrier hexacopter and the Longbow 7 behind it; and a ground-based Detection Node. An operator console watches the fleet, its traffic and its detections. The company is early, pre-flight and deliberately narrow.