Discordant Technologies LLC · Madison, Wisconsin

Precision guidance for dropped munitions

Low-cost guidance hardware for small drone-dropped munitions and other payloads. Bolt-on kits and seekers that give existing airframes and existing munitions the accuracy of far more expensive weapons. Further civilian and non-lethal military drone delivery applications.

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FoundedApril 2024

LocationMadison, Wisconsin, USA

UEI / CAGEF8L9VXNTXFM1 / 22FD5

Patents2 filed

The problem

Unguided munitions miss

Small drones have made dropped munitions easy to deliver but difficult to aim. Drops from multirotor and fixed-wing drones are highly sensitive to environmental conditions, and success depends on operator skill and luck. Traditional guidance packages are unsuitable for drone use and cost far more than the munitions they would attach to.

Control authority

Unlike manned aircraft flying thousands of feet in the air at hundreds of knots, drones typically fly slowly at hundreds of feet in the air. The low altitude means that guided munitions dropped from drones have only seconds to maneuver before hitting the ground, and the low airspeed means that traditional control surfaces like fins do not provide enough control authority to maneuver.

Target sensing

Terminal accuracy requires knowing where the target is. In conventional semi-active laser (SAL) guided weapons, the seeker head — optics, gimbal, focal-plane array — is the single most expensive subsystem.

The products

Two halves of one guidance chain

Drop Bear solves control authority — how a falling munition steers. Mothman solves target sensing — how it knows where to steer. Each stands alone; together they form a complete low-cost terminal guidance package.

Drop Bear

Precision guidance kit

A bolt-on kit that converts a standard drone-dropped munition into a guided one, steering with spinning rotors instead of fins.

Class60, 81/82 mm mortar or similar

Payload~1–4 kg

ActuationFlettner rotor / Magnus effect

GuidanceProportional navigation

ExportDDTC CJ determination: non-ITAR
BIS classification pending

IPNon-provisional filed Jun 2025
PCT application filed

StatusTRL 6: Flight tested Sep 2025

Mothman

Semi-active laser seeker

A terminal seeker that computes line-of-sight to a laser-designated target using no imaging optics at all.

TypeSemi-active laser

ArchitectureLensless discrete photodiode array using photodiode angular sensitivity

Designator compatibilityNear-infrared, modulated, continuous-wave laser (1064 nm pulsed-laser compatibility under development)

IPNon-provisional filed Jun 2026
Foreign filing license granted
PCT in progress

StatusTRL 6: Outdoor tracking test Feb 2026

INTEGRATED SYSTEM · TRL 4 — Each product is independently at TRL 6. Operated together as a combined guidance kit, the system is at TRL 4.

Drop Bear

Steering without fins

A cylinder spinning in an airstream generates lift perpendicular to the flow. This is the Magnus effect and is the same force that causes baseballs to curve and soccer balls to bend. Drop Bear uses spinning cylinders — known as Flettner rotors — to generate more control authority than comparably sized traditional control surfaces such as fins and canards. This solves the problem of maneuvering from a low-altitude (100 meter, 330'), zero-speed release. While other guidance kits exist, no fielded guidance kit we're aware of can perform releases from 100 meters, which is important for flying below anti-drone radar and for potential civilian delivery applications. (The FAA limits drones to flying at most 400' — 122 meters — above ground level.) The design is also mechanically simple, requiring only a motor, a bearing, and two pieces of plastic (either 3D-printed or injection molded).

Line-art illustration of a bear riding a bomb through clouds

More control authority

Flettner rotors generate more aerodynamic force than comparably sized fins or other control surfaces.

Lower altitude drops

The increased control authority allows for accurate drops from 100 meters (330') above ground level at zero initial speed.

Mechanically simple

The rotor is simply a hollow plastic cylinder that is driven directly by a motor and supported by a bearing.

FLIGHT TEST · SEP 2025 — Open-loop drone drop from ~100 meters demonstrated 17 meters of lateral translation.

Drop test · real time

Mothman

A seeker without lenses

Conventional semi-active laser seekers use complex optics (lenses, filters, etc.) and, often, a gimbal to resolve the reflected laser spot. This makes the seeker the costliest subsystem in many weapons. Mothman removes the optics and gimbal entirely. An array of discrete photodiodes samples the reflected spot directly, and onboard signal processing solves for the line-of-sight direction.

Discrete photodiode array — no lens, no gimbal, no focal-plane array — with photodiodes oriented in different directions
Determines line-of-sight direction using the angular sensitivity of photodiodes
Uses a continuous-wave (CW) laser as the designator to reduce cost
Ideal for use with proportional navigation

TRACKING TEST · FEB 2026 — Outdoor demonstration of line-of-sight computation against a designated target at 100 meters in nighttime conditions.

The team

About us

Discordant Technologies LLC is a startup in Madison, Wisconsin, USA, that brings physics and user perspectives together to create low-cost, innovative hardware.

Leon Maurer

Founder

PhD in physics, UW–Madison. Previously Sandia National Laboratories (quantum electronic devices and atomic-precision manufacturing) and Google (BigQuery and Dataflow infrastructure). FAA Part 107 remote pilot.

Andrew Pierson

Advisor

MIT-trained engineer and former U.S. Air Force Special Tactics Officer and JTAC, with senior program-management experience at Disney, Peloton, and SiriusXM, who provides end-user and program perspective.

Moritz Münchmeyer

Advisor

Associate Professor of Physics at UW–Madison and cofounder of wolution.ai, who provides technical and business guidance.

Contact

Talk to us

If you are interested in low-cost precision guidance, drop us a line. Drop Bear and Mothman are modular technologies that can be combined or separately integrated into other projects. Technical briefing materials are available on request.

info@discordant.tech

EntityDiscordant Technologies LLC

UEIF8L9VXNTXFM1

CAGE22FD5

LocationMadison, Wisconsin, USA