Teledyne Flir

Teledyne FLIR is a thermal-imaging and sensor company founded in 1978 and headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon, originally known as FLIR Systems. Teledyne Technologies acquired FLIR for about US$8 billion in 2021, forming the current Teledyne FLIR business, which supplies thermal cameras, sensors and small unmanned aircraft to government and defence customers.

History and products

FLIR built its unmanned-systems line mainly through acquisition: it bought the Norwegian company Prox Dynamics in 2016 for about US$134 million, gaining the palm-sized Black Hornet personal reconnaissance UAV, and acquired Aeryon Labs in 2019 for about US$200 million, adding fixed and multi-rotor mapping and inspection drones such as the SkyRanger line. The company also purchased Endeavor Robotics in 2019 for unmanned ground vehicles and licensed tethered-drone patents from Aria Insights the same year. Its Black Hornet family, now in its fourth generation, remains the company's best-known aircraft, fielded by more than 20 armed forces.

Products on this site

The Black Hornet 3 and Black Hornet 4 are the current generations of its personal reconnaissance nano-helicopter, and the Black Recon is a vehicle-launched, boxed variant carrying several of them. The SkyRanger R70 and R80D SkyRaider are larger multi-rotor platforms from the Aeryon Labs acquisition, and the Argus XL and LVSS are counter-UAS detection systems.