Paris Air Show 2025: Parrot unveils ANAFI UKR drone

At the Paris Air Show 2025, French drone manufacturer Parrot unveiled their new ANAFI UKR series of sub 1 kg class quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The ANAFI UKR builds upon Parrot’s earlier ANAFI USA model, slightly larger, sitting at nearly double the weight, and with expanded capabilities in terms of sensory, navigation and communication capabilities.

As their names would suggest, the ANAFI USA was built for US requirements, while the “ANIFI UKR was predominantly designed for Ukrainian requirements”, explained Chris Roberts, Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer at Parrot. As with the USA model, the manufacturer offers the UKR series in two variants – military (ANAFI UKR) and a police and public safety (ANAFI UKR GOV). Regarding differences between the UKR military and UKR GOV variants, Roberts said: “the only difference between the defence version and the government version is the military radio.”

ANAFI UKR weighs 959 g (with standard battery), with a maximum take-off weight (MTOW) of 1,450 g. It has a maximum horizontal airspeed of 17 m/s, and ascent or descent at 8 m/s, as well as being able to operate in wind speeds of up to 15 m/s. Range is dependent on which battery is selected, and Parrot presently offers two models – a 6,800 mAh capacity model weighing 334 g permitting an endurance of around 38 minutes at a speed of 6 m/s; and the XLR model providing a 13,600 mAh capacity, weighing 684 g, and permitting an endurance of around 50 minutes. As should be unsurprising, the heavier battery would increase the drone’s weight to 1,309 g, and so limits the available payload headroom from 491 g with the standard battery, down to 141 g with the XLR model.

Roberts also highlighted that the company had tried to keep the drone’s acoustic signature low: “77 decibels [dBA] at 1 m is the rating. We put a lot of effort into the acoustics of it – it was something that was being asked for in many countries”. This is a notable improvement over the USA model, which according to the white paper published for that model had an acoustic signature of 84 dBA at 1 m – which to put the figure in context was still quieter than many of its commercial contemporaries.

While not weaponised by default, Ukraine has proven itself adept at modifying commercial UAVs, and such in-theatre modifications could not be ruled out. In this vein, if munition payloads were to be considered, the available payload with standard battery would limit it to roughly a hand grenade – though as has been seen in footage from Ukraine, for some applications this can be sufficient. However, Ukraine also has no shortage of heavier weaponised drones, and so operationally the ANAFI UKR would presumably be of more utility to their forces in the reconnaissance role.

The ANAFI UKR is equipped with the MARS radio link on the military version; this has a line-of-sight (LoS) transmission range of 15 km, operates at frequencies between 1.8 and 5 GHz and supports a data transmission rate of up to 6.2 Mbps. The radio includes various features aimed at resisting jamming and preventing information leakage to hostile electronic intelligence (ELINT). To this end, MARS an encrypted channel and capable of adaptive frequency-hopping, along with interference rejection of up to -3dBm. Additionally, if the MARS link does get jammed, ANAFI UKR is able to fall back to the LoRa (Long-range) radio link, with a range of 20 km and capable of operating on two different frequency bands (EU: 863-870 MHz or US: 902-928 MHz). The controller and drone also support 5G LTE and WiFi connectivity.

The ANAFI UKR’s primary imaging sensors are mounted on a gyrostabilised gimballed sight, and comprise two day cameras (one wide angle, one telephoto, both using the Sony IMX 230 sensor) which are capable of shooting in 4K colour at 30 fps, along with a Teledyne FLIR Boson long-wave infrared (LWIR) camera with 640 × 512 resolution for night operations – this capable of detecting a human-sized target at up to 2.2 km. All of these are an improvement over the earlier USA model, which had a lower-resolution Boson LWIR sensor (320 × 256 resolution), and the day cameras were limited to 24 fps at 4K, with slightly decreased zoom capabilities for the telephoto camera (32× on the ANAFI USA vs 35× on the ANAFI UKR).

What is perhaps most noteworthy about ANAFI UKR is its navigation system. While ANAFI UKR is equipped with a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) transceiver, which is necessary for some functions such as return-to-home, the company has also invested considerable effort into making navigation possible in the absence of GNSS signals. In this vein, the drone is fitted with two stereoscopic cameras (comprising one pair of lenses staring ahead, one pair staring down), which use scene-matching to compare and match optical inputs to terrain map data stored in their on-board memory. The cameras see in black-and-white, with a resolution of 1200 × 800. Roberts stated that a map of the entirety of Ukraine would occupy around 360 GB of memory, with this being feasible given the drone’s 512 GB of flash memory storage. According to Roberts “it overlays four different algorithms to compare: ‘is that this road at this point? Are these the trees I saw at the corner of the forest where the river was running?’ And then all of this is done in real-time on the drone.”

Roberts also noted that for navigation at night, a downward-staring Boson LWIR camera module (with the same 640 × 512 resolution) could be fitted to onto the underside of the drone to enable the optical navigation system to work at night.

Such capabilities require a fair amount of processing power to run them ‘at the edge’, and so the ANAFI UKR employs a Qualcomm QRB5165 system-on-chip (SoC), with 64 GB of LPDDR5 RAM.

Among the many advantages of employing this form of optical navigation is the possibility of limiting the drone’s emissions to hide it from hostile electronic intelligence (ELINT) sensors during operations; as the ‘ANAFI UKR White Paper’ document supplied by Parrot states: “When the drone is flying autonomously (in flight plan), the user can completely disable the MARS radio and/or the LoRa between multiple waypoints. In this case, the drone is in silent mode and doesn’t emit any high-power RF emissions.” Such capabilities should, depending on the mission plan, allow the ANAFI UKR to be able to sneak into areas which may be difficult for most drones reliant on radio frequency (RF) control.

In terms of pilot controls, the ANAFI UKR is provided with Parrot’s Skycontroller ground control station, with twin thumbstick controls and flat panel display. To decrease risk to the pilot, the Skycontroller can be hooked up to a second Skycontroller or MARS RANGER remote antenna, via an ethernet cable up to 100 m long. If this configuration is used, the pilot can remotely control the drone from a secure location through their Skycontroller, while the control signals are routed through the remote antenna.

Alongside ANAFI UKR, the company also unveiled their Chuck 3.0 module for the first time. In simple terms, this is essentially a ready-built ‘core’ which would be integrated into most types of user-defined small UAV design. Using many of the same sensory, navigation, and communications components as those on ANAFI UKR, albeit with a slightly different shape of gimbal. This design would allow users to mount Chuck 3.0 on their custom UAV designs, while providing many of the same features and functions as developed for ANAFI UKR.

According to the company, the ANAFI UKR model is already in production. Roberts stressed that “There [are] no Chinese components in this system”, adding “we manufacture our systems in South Korea and the US”.

Mark Cazalet