PARIS, June 19, 2025 — At this year’s Paris Air Show, French UAV innovator Parrot SA took a bold step forward in autonomous drone technology with the debut of the ANAFI UKR, a lightweight, AI-powered micro-drone built for contested environments, and the CHUCK 3.0, a modular “drone brain” designed for integration into virtually any aerial platform.
With global interest in GPS-denied drone capabilities growing — especially following the electronic warfare challenges in Ukraine — Parrot’s new systems signal a clear focus on resilient, sovereign, and off-grid drone autonomy.
Built for the Realities of Electronic Warfare
Weighing just over two pounds, the ANAFI UKR is operational in under two minutes and offers up to 56 minutes of flight time, putting it at the high-performance end of micro-UAS. What truly sets it apart, though, is its ability to operate entirely offline, without GPS or cloud connectivity, and still execute precision navigation using onboard optical mapping and AI-driven autonomy.
“This is tactical autonomy in a box,” reports SpaceAutonomy.ai. “Plug in your maps, deploy in minutes, fly through a jammed EM environment — and recover the intel without ever connecting to a cloud.”
Operators can preload mission maps into the drone’s internal memory. Once airborne, the drone reads terrain and navigates its environment visually, even identifying features like roads and buildings to make real-time, on-map decisions. It’s also cybersecure by default, compliant with Europe’s GDPR and fully air-gapped unless a user manually connects it to a European cloud platform.
A military-use controller with an enhanced antenna allows remote operation up to 50 miles away from protected locations, making the ANAFI UKR ideal for frontline ISR in GPS-denied or spoofed theaters.
The system is already in use by NATO partners and has seen field deployment in Ukraine, underscoring its operational maturity.
Enter CHUCK 3.0: AI Autopilot for Any Drone
Also unveiled was CHUCK 3.0, a sovereign European-built drone brain designed to detach advanced autonomous capabilities from any single airframe. Roughly the size of a paperback and weighing about a pound, CHUCK integrates:
- AI-powered flight control
- Spoof-proof multiband radio
- Optical navigation for GPS-denied ops
It’s a universal control hub capable of being mounted on quadcopters, VTOL systems, fixed-wing drones, helicopters, and hybrid UAVs, making it ideal for defense forces or manufacturers looking to scale up capabilities without dependency on foreign tech or locked-down platforms.
While the ANAFI UKR and CHUCK 3.0 are separate hardware units, they run on the same internal architecture — essentially sharing the same “brain” in different form factors.
“CHUCK 3.0 is more than an autopilot. It’s a sovereign edge-AI module for future battlefield airframes,” we observed at SpaceAutonomy.ai.
Parrot emphasized that CHUCK is a key part of Europe’s move to reduce reliance on Chinese-made drone components and build out independent defense tech ecosystems.
🧠 SpaceAutonomy.ai Takeaway:
Parrot’s launch at the Paris Air Show reflects a growing demand for trusted, secure, and adaptable autonomous systems. In an era of electronic warfare, real-time ISR, and decentralized mission ops, offline-first AI and modular autonomy solutions are quickly becoming mission-critical.
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