TF / Platform

Autonomous systems that touch the earth.

One aircraft, one mission profile: fly to a point on Earth, understand it from the air, land on it, sample it, and report back, with no operator in the loop.

TerraFirma Robotics blended wing body aircraft
FIG.01 · Blended wing body airframe Santa Barbara, CA

001 / The aircraft

Every layer of the stack, engineered in-house.

TerraFirma Robotics Manta blended wing body aircraft, rendered from current CAD, with subsystem callouts
FIG.02 · Manta airframe · rendered from current CAD rev · probe + belly camera ventral 666 mm span

002 / Mission profile

Four phases. Zero operators.

01 Survey Coverage pattern 02 Land Site selection 03 Sample Probe contact 04 Transmit Compressed uplink
PHASE 01

Survey

The aircraft flies an autonomous coverage pattern over the target area while on-board vision models classify terrain and vegetation in real time.

PHASE 02

Land

On-board perception selects and verifies a safe landing site at points of interest identified during the survey. No prepared surface required.

PHASE 03

Sample

The retractable soil probe deploys on contact. Ground-contact data is fused with aerial imagery into a single verified record.

PHASE 04

Transmit

Findings are compressed on the aircraft and sent over cellular or satellite. Decisions move in seconds.

003 / Subsystems

What's under the skin.

SYS / Airframe

Blended wing body

The entire airframe generates lift. That efficiency translates directly into endurance, range, and payload margin, and across a fleet, into mission economics conventional multirotors can't reach.

SYS / Perception

On-board visual intelligence

Stereo vision and vision-language models run on NVIDIA-accelerated edge compute. The aircraft doesn't just record the world. It understands what it's looking at, in flight, without a link to the cloud.

SYS / Sampling

Direct ground measurement

A single integrated retractable probe is what separates ground truth from inference. Subsurface conditions are measured at the point of contact, geotagged, and timestamped: research-grade data with full provenance.

SYS / Autonomy

Edge flight autonomy

Obstacle avoidance, landing-site selection, and dynamic mission replanning all run on the aircraft. Connectivity loss doesn't end the mission. The system completes its objectives and reports back when a link returns.

SYS / Data

Bandwidth-aware architecture

Raw sensor streams are analyzed and compressed on-board so the uplink carries decisions, not pixels. The same architecture operates over cellular where coverage exists and satellite where it doesn't, anywhere on Earth, including nowhere.

004 / Platform sheet

The platform at a glance.

Airframe
Blended wing body, 666 mm wingspan
Propulsion
2× tilt-rotor caged propellers · VTOL to cruise transition
Imaging resolution
Sub-centimeter ground sample distance
Revisit cadence
3× daily, per aircraft
Sensing
3× cameras · stereo VIO pair + nadir survey · RGB + thermal · retractable soil probe (moisture, temperature, EC, pH) · onboard sensors record continuously while docked + charging
Edge compute
NVIDIA-accelerated AI · vision-language models on the aircraft
Connectivity
Cellular LTE primary · satellite fallback
Compliance
NDAA compliant, US designed and manufactured

Detailed performance specifications available under NDA.

005 / Ground segment

From aircraft to answer.

Mission planning & control

Plan coverage, monitor the fleet, and stay inside airspace constraints, with weather integration and no-fly-zone compliance built in.

Analytics & integration

Verified measurements flow into customizable dashboards, automated reports, and the GIS platforms your team already uses.

Operations support

Training, technical consulting, and mission-critical support for programs that can't afford a gap in coverage.

Aircraft 01  SENSE 02  UNDERSTAND · VLM ON EDGE 03  COMPRESS SATELLITE · NTN · FALLBACK CELLULAR · LTE · PRIMARY DECISIONS IN SECONDS → Ground MISSION CONTROL ANALYTICS + DASHBOARDS GIS EXPORT VERIFIED + TIMESTAMPED
FIG.03 · Edge-to-ground data flow Compressed uplink · adaptive link selection

006 / Demonstration

See the platform fly.

Request a personalized demonstration and a detailed technical briefing.

Request a demo