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A California robotics company called Machina has been issued a $9 million award for a containerized system to robotically mass-produce Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) airframes close to the point of need. As TWZ has frequently noted, LUCAS drones, and one-way attack weapons like them, are playing an increasing role in U.S. combat operations and military planning.

The award to Machina is the latest example of the Pentagon’s push to use containerized 3D printing and other advanced fabricating systems closer to the front lines to shorten supply chains that could get severely degraded in a major conflict. Decentralizing production of drones also allows units to be more flexible and tailor their own production to their specific needs at any given moment. For instance, a unit can produce variations of multiple designs that are best suited to an upcoming mission instead of having to use whatever they are shipped.

This 18-month contract from the Defense Department’s Organic Industrial Base Modernization Challenge calls for Machina to prove it can build LUCAS drones at deployed locations with its RoboCraftsman system, Ed Mehr, founder and CEO of Machina, told TWZ Friday afternoon. A decision on producing them at scale in many other locales will come later.

Creating containerized production of drones and components using 3D printing and other advanced manufacturing techniques at the forward edge is a burgeoning industry. The Machina system is one of a rapidly growing number of capabilities built around this concept, although many focus on smaller drones.

RoboCraftsman was built to manufacture where it’s needed. It folds & ships in 2 ISO 668 containers.

Building Drones Near The Point Of Need

Initially, the plan calls for Machina to set up so-called “Edge Factories” at two locations in the continental United States, said Mehr. However, the ultimate goal is to be able to deploy them to forward locations in countries like Kuwait.

The Edge Factories consist of the company’s containerized RoboCraftsman manufacturing cells, Mehr told us. A 20-foot by 36-foot system that weighs 120,000 pounds fully installed, it is essentially two robotic arms that form the airframe out of metal using reductive manufacturing based on a variety of requirements. Payload weight, range and other factors are punched into a software system designed by the nTop company and the robotic arms then cut the metal into the desired form factor based on the required specifications.

Machina uses metal instead of composites that many drones are made out of because “not only it is cheaper, it is more widely available and now can be processed with an automated process like ours versus composites, which are all done by hand layup,” Mehr explained.

The following Machina video shows how the RoboCraftsman system, guided by the inputs, forms the metal to craft the airframe.

Metal Drone Skins, Robotic Forming & the Future of Defense Manufacturing | Machina is the Factory

This avoids having to use equipment like dies and rolls, dramatically speeding the process and allowing production at scale, Mehr stated.

“Basically, the agentic AI agents can explore and generate whole different versions of an airframe with different parameters,” Mehr proffered. “Because now it’s parameterized, you can just change the parameters and you get another airframe, and then evaluate if that airframe is good for the requirement they want.”

This way, the RoboCraftsman system “can easily generate 20, 30, 40, 50 different designs just in software, and then put it through simulations to figure out which one actually meets the requirement for that,” the Machina CEO added.

“The concept is that we’re going to bring this capability closer to the point of need, so that you can build a different requirement for let’s say PACOM versus U.S. CENTCOM versus in Ukraine,” Mehr said. “They can easily switch and build a drone that they need.”

Under this contract, each Edge Factory will consist of one or two RoboCraftsman cells and each cell can make a LUCAS airframe in two to five days, depending on the size, Mehr said. A scaled deployment of 10 or more cells would take place under a new contract, he added.

The systems can make “anywhere from a one-off all the way to the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands,” Mehr said. It all depends on the number of RoboCraftsman systems that are ordered.

At the moment, Mehr envisions that each 12-foot airframe will cost “somewhere around $15,000 to $40,000,” depending on the complexity. This range is a relatively common price point for Russian Shahed-136 variants and U.S. knockoffs under the LUCAS program.

The company has already produced a six-foot, half-scale airframe that was recently tested at Edwards Air Force Base, said Mehr. However, that initial test proved problematic.

“The first design had some challenges with crosswind mitigation,” Mehr told us. “Since then, we have moved the location of the engine slightly to enable better crosswind mitigation, and now we’re running again. And the beauty is for us to go from one design to the next is just like a couple of months, a maximum of three months. Like we can just then try it again.”

Mehr said that Machina is not working with SpektreWorks, which designed and made the LUCAS drones previously supplied to the U.S. military and already used in combat. SpektreWorks declined to comment.

The Edge Factory contract is one of several Machina has been awarded to use these systems to help build and repair military hardware.

In July, Machina was issued a qualification contract by Lockheed Martin to produce fuel tanks for AGM-158 Joint Air-To-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSM).

That plan called for the creation of a 200,000-square-foot facility “designed to house up to 50 RoboCraftsman cells and support high-rate production of mission-critical metal structures for defense programs including JASSM,” according to a media release at the time. “By integrating forming, machining, welding, and assembly under one roof, Machina Factory 3 compresses production timelines from months to days.”

“Lockheed Martin Ventures invested in Machina Labs for its powerful combination of speed, flexibility, and scalability, and our teams have worked closely to transition key capabilities to production,” said Chris Moran, vice president and general manager, Lockheed Martin Ventures. “Machina’s work advances capacity, reduces risk, and helps ensure we can deliver mission-critical capabilities at scale. We congratulate Machina on this milestone as a supplier, which further strengthens an innovative and resilient American Defense Industrial Base.”

Earlier this year, a Machina RoboCraftsman platform helped repair a C-17 Globemaster III cargo jet that was damaged during a tornado, Mehr told us.

The system “fabricated a first-of-its-kind replacement part for the damaged C-17 without the need for dedicated tooling,” the company noted. “Machina deployed a RoboCraftsman at the RSO [Rapid Sustainment Office], where production for a left nose panel began in March 2026 and was completed in May 2026. The aircraft returned to flight on July 30, 2026 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.”

We asked the Pentagon for information about why they selected Machina and their metrics for success, but we have not heard back yet.

Pentagon Pushing For Deployable Manufacturing

The U.S. military has been pushing for several years for the employment of mobile additive and other forms of advanced manufacturing “to produce unmanned aircraft components in remote or austere environments and reduce dependence on traditional supply chains,” the Air Force’s innovation arm, AFWERX, noted last month.

The idea is to place these systems in a wide array of locations, produce the quantity needed and tailor the airframe for the mission.

In one such case, the Air National Guard and Air Force Special Operations Command partnered with the San Diego-based Firestorm company in 2023 “to create an expeditionary assembly unit capable of mass-producing unmanned aerial systems,” according to the Pentagon.

The result was called an Expeditionary Manufacturing Cell or xCell.

“It’s basically an expeditionary 3D printer,” Master Sgt. Richard Stone, 194th Air Support Operations Group innovation officer, explained at the time. “The basis of the technology is … it’s about the size of a [shipping container] and it can print out, for this specific use case, drones.”

“Inside this [shipping container], it’ll print out all the components,” said Stone “But then you have what’s called RPA, which is robotic process [automation.]”

The xCell “prints the individual pieces and then uses RPA to assemble the major components of the drone,” the Pentagon added.

“The user can take these components and, almost like Legos, put them together,” said Stone. “So if you want a longer drone with a specific payload, you can take those components and put them together and the computer will tell you, ‘This is where the wings go and this is where the center of gravity should be.”

The company went on to produce Tempest drones that were flying with 3rd Littoral Combat Team, 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, during Exercise Balikatan 2026 at Cagayan North International Airport in the Philippines, AFWERX noted.

Our own Jamie Hunter recently interviewed Craig Anders, senior vice president of growth at Aevex, about the company’s ForgeX containerized 3D drone printing system.

The ForgeX system “represents being able to take the fight further forward, print drones on demand, print them out towards the front of the lines, cut down the logistics trail, and absolutely revolutionize the battlefield,” said Anders. 

The goal is to be “able to kick these planes out the door on short timelines to go out and get the missions done, work within the local area to make sure that the mission can be accomplished by any means necessary,” he added.

Anders said the ForgeX printers fabricate three types of drones, the Vandal, Onyx and Raker. He added that the system can produce up to 880 a year.

AEVEX’s ForgeX containerized 3D printed drone mini factory

Growing U.S. Reliance On LUCAS

The U.S. military first announced it had begun fielding LUCAS, which was reverse-engineered from the Iranian-designed Shahed-136, in December 2025. This came just months after TWZ laid out a detailed case for why the U.S. military should start acquiring Shahed-136 clones in large volumes. LUCAS made its official combat debut in the opening phases of major combat operations against Iran earlier this year. The pusher-propeller, combustion-engine-powered kamikaze drones were first launched from the ground, a U.S. official told us at the time. They can also be fired from ships. In March, CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper told us the LUCAS drones were “indispensable.”

The following video shows Cooper answering our question about the LUCAS drones.

Now the Army is looking to expand the use of these weapons to the Pacific, Maj. Gen. Bernard Harrington, head of the 7th Infantry Division, told us during the Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) conference last month.

“So we see that playing a key role in order to be able to achieve that effect at mass, … [and] in an affordable manner, while also being able potentially to preserve something that’s more exquisite for something that requires an exquisite munition.”

“So as we start modeling out what it looks like to be able to penetrate a portion of the anti-access/area denial network in support of the joint task force in the PACOM [U.S. Pacific Command] area of operations, we started looking at, well, how do I bend – how do I achieve mass at a cost curve?” the 7th Infantry and MDC-PAC commander explained. “What effect am I really trying to achieve on a system in order to provide that window of opportunity for that joint force commander?”

“So maybe I don’t necessarily need to sink a ship, but if I take out certain systems on that vessel, well then it creates this temporal window opportunity,” he continued. “Then that joint force commander can surge in that carrier strike group or bomber task force.”

While the exact details of the LUCAS program requirements have been hard to pin down, it’s likely that multiple drone types from multiple manufacturers could become part of the program as time goes on. Ed Mehr gave us an idea of what that could look like:

“Shahed clearly inspired LUCAS, which stands for Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System. But we shouldn’t confuse the inspiration with the destination. The future isn’t about mass-producing replicas of one drone. Different theaters and missions demand different performance, and therefore different designs. That could mean a LUCAS-style drone or a wide variety of Group 2 and Group 3 unmanned aircraft. The real breakthrough is making that diversity affordable. We’re developing flexible manufacturing technologies that can produce many different designs cost-effectively using one of the cheapest and most proven aerospace materials: sheet metal. It’s what aircraft have been built from for generations. We’re bringing it into an era where manufacturing can adapt as quickly as the mission.”

We won’t know how the Machina contract ultimately pans out until sometime in mid-2028. Regardless, given the importance of both the LUCAS drones and deployable, additive and advanced manufacturing are becoming, this is likely a first step in what could be a whole new logistics concept that could underpin a significant portion of the growing LUCAS program.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com