Within the next few months Lithuanian unmanned aerial system (UAS) specialist Granta Autonomy will achieve production standard, or Technology Readiness Level 9 (TRL 9), with its new Black Wasp counter-UAS interceptor not by testing it against surrogate targets over Lithuania but by travelling to Ukraine and shooting down a Russian-launched Shahed one-way attack drone.
Speaking to Warsight at Eurosatory 2026 on 16 June, Granta Autonomy CEO Gediminas Guoba explained that, regarding how the company matures a new product, “Until it’s tested in a real environment, then it’s just a prototype. So, yeah, TRL 9 exactly is about that: you test it on real targets in a real environment, and then we can call it a product. That’s what the final test will be about: going to Ukraine, going to the battlefield, going to that ‘highway of Shaheds’, finding one and bringing it down.”
Thus continues a company ethos that this author discovered when first meeting with Guoba at Eurosatory 2024. At that point Granta Autonomy was finalising development of its first product, the Hornet XR reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), by flying it in Ukraine – and thus ensuring that the system could operate effectively in the harsh electronic warfare environment over the Ukrainian front lines. On its stand during Eurosatory that year the company even had surveillance footage of Russian troops in Ukraine recorded by its own UAVs during the week prior to the show.
Since then Granta Autonomy has sold the Hornet XR reconnaissance UAS to around a dozen NATO or NATO-aligned European countries.
Then, in September 2025, Granta Autonomy introduced its X-Wing vertical take-off loitering munition, designed to be a ‘shooter’ to the company’s Hornet XR ‘sensor’. Measuring 130×120×60 cm and propelled by four electrically powered propellors, the X-Wing launches vertically and has a range of 50 km carrying its 4 kg hybrid warhead, which can penetrate heavily armoured vehicles while also producing a large number of fragments, making the X-Wing additionally effective against softer targets like radars and anti-aircraft systems.
The X-Wing employs a jam-resistant datalink operating in the S- and C-bands, with multiple opto-electronic seekers, including daylight and infrared cameras, as an option.
Guoba explained that, while the company started out by looking to provide an effective reconnaissance capability to a depth of 20 km, by last year with the Hornet XR and X-Wing combination it could provide both the means to find targets and also strike them out to a range of 50 km.
“So that’s the same system: the same team can do a reconnaissance and can do a strike,” said Guoba. That’s all about small group tactics, to enable small groups to work independently; that was the most important thing.
“Then this year, at this Eurosatory, we are launching the third element of the whole group: a counter-UAS drone. So we have reconnaissance, we have a striking capability, but at the same time you can defend yourself.”
Measuring 600×450×450 mm and with a maximum take-off weight of around 4 kg, the Black Wasp launches vertically and is propelled by four electrically powered propellors. Carrying a warhead payload of up to 500 g, it has a cruise speed of 160 km/h, a maximum speed of 320 km/h, a climb rate of 30 m/s and has an operational altitude of up to 7,000 m MSL. At its maximum speed the Black Wasp has an endurance of greater than six minutes, while at cruise speed its endurance can be up to 15 minutes.
Like the X-Wing, the Black Wasp uses an artificial intelligence/machine learning-based flight control system for enhanced manoeuvrability and employs a jam-resistant datalink operating in the S- and C-bands, again with multiple opto-electronic seekers, including daylight and infrared cameras, as an option.
Most importantly, however, the Black Wasp will share the same marketing USP shared by all Granta Autonomy products: proven to be effective in Ukraine.
Founded by Guoba in 2009 as a software development company, Granta Autonomy only started to work on UAVs in the wake of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.
“We became [military UAV] operators at that time and we already saw UAVs making a huge impact on the battlefield … and we said ‘OK, [this is] what we can do about trying to protect our country, creating such a capability,” Guoba explained at Eurosatory 2024. “So that’s where we started, as a small company, creating UAVs as a side project, but from the beginning we knew that our UAV should work in Russian-occupied territory: it should be jamming resilient and it should work in a GNSS-denied environment.”
