A TRV-150 tactical resupply drone fires a 70 mm Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System rocket during flight testing at Fort Rucker, Ala., on May 20, 2026. (Leslie Herlick/U.S. Army)
A company that builds logistics drones for the Army and Marine Corps successfully fired a three-shot rocket launcher from its autonomous quadcopter last week at Fort Rucker, Ala., Army officials said.
Survice Engineering Company officials outfitted their Tactical Resupply Drone 150 — or TRV-150 — with a three-pack Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System, a 70mm rocket launcher known as APKWS, and engaged targets, according to a Fort Rucker news release. The May 20 test came amid ever-increasing efforts across the U.S. military to test new ways to use drones and to add more lethal capabilities to the unmanned systems.
Army officials said they did not request the new capability for the heavily used TRV-150 system, which the service and the Marine Corps have employed for more than three years, mostly for resupply and other logistics operations. Survice officials believed they could outfit their drone with the BAE Systems-made rocket launcher and decided to pitch it to the Army.
“In this case, we saw that there was something that we could prove out, a new capability, and we didn’t want to wait for a requirement” from the Army, said Clark Dutterer, Survice Engineering’s vice president of business development. “We self-funded this to go ahead and do that.”
But the Army was involved in the testing. Soldiers from several organizations, including the Army Aviation Center of Excellence, Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, and the Aviation Future Concepts Design Directorate participated in the efforts, according to the service.
Army officials said the effort was a step toward the military’s eventual aim to be able to arm all of its drones with some kind of lethal capability.
A TRV-150 resupply drone undergoes flight testing at Fort Rucker, Ala., to evaluate flight control software and physical response while carrying a 70 mm rocket launcher. (Leslie Herlick/U.S. Army)
The TRV-150 is an electric, vertical takeoff and landing drone with a wingspan of just more than 6.5 feet that can carry payloads up to 150 pounds. Soldiers and Marines have been experimenting with the drones for various logistics purposes and using it for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. At Fort Stewart, soldiers recently used TRV-150s outfitted with smoke machines to try to provide cover while moving large vehicles, including tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles across training grounds.
The drone is designed to be easy to use and provides power, data and expansion ports to carry many different payloads, said Rob Baltrusch, Survice’s chief engineer.
“It calculates all of the range estimation and takes a lot of the pilot duties away from the soldier, to where they can literally give it a grid coordinate, wait, and it tells you if it can make it there, delivers the payload and calculates the route,” he said.
Survice has been working on the APKWS rockets as a potential payload since January 2025. In testing in May 2025 at the Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, the company was able to use single-shot rocket launchers in an air-to-air engagement against a fixed-wing drone and conduct two air-to-ground shots, Army officials said. The Fort Rucker test last week saw their first attempt to use the three-launcher rocket system on the drone.
The APKWS has been used in the military since the late 2000s, and it has been mounted on dozens of platforms, including on the Army’s AH-64 Apache gunships.
The Army plans continued testing of the APKWS on the TRV-150 this year during experimentation events at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., in June and at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., in September.
