Autonomous sail drones · Miami, Florida
Sail drones that go where the data is.
Tackron builds small, wind‑powered vessels that sail the ocean on their own, report back over cellular and satellite, and keep going for as long as the wind and sun hold.
- Wind‑powered, solar‑charged
- Cellular today, satellite on the same radio
- Waypoint missions with tacking corridors
- Keeps sailing when the link drops
Platform
Three things have to be true for a boat to be left alone at sea.
It has to move without fuel, decide without a pilot, and report without a coastline. The Tackron platform is built around those three.
01 / PROPULSION
Sail, not motor
The only moving parts under load are a rudder and a winch. No fuel, no range limit, no motor to seize. Solar keeps the electronics and servos charged, so endurance is set by the weather, not the battery.
02 / AUTONOMY
It sails the route itself
Give it waypoints. It reads the wind from its own vane, picks tacks, and works upwind inside a corridor you set, so you know before launch what water it will use. At the end it holds station until told otherwise.
03 / CONNECTIVITY
One radio, land and sea
Cellular near shore and non‑terrestrial satellite networks offshore on the same low‑power modem, with GNSS fixes scheduled to the mission's power budget. Positions, wind, heel and images come back; new routes go out.
How a mission runs
Plan it on a phone. Launch it from a beach. Watch it from anywhere.
Plan
Drop waypoints on the chart and set a tacking width for each leg. The corridor is drawn on the map, so clearing a shoal or a channel is a matter of looking.
Sail
The boat trims to the apparent wind, tacks when it reaches the corridor's edge, and schedules GPS fixes against the leg's length and the fix error it can afford.
Report
Each check‑in carries position, heading, wind, heel, drift between fixes and photos. Alerts come to the phone when it is overpowered, drifting backwards or can't place itself.
Hold
At the last waypoint it loiters inside a hold circle, large by default to keep power low. If the link drops mid‑route, it finishes the route and holds there until it hears from you.
Where we sail
Long watches in the places people don't want to send a crew.
A sail drone's value is time on station. Days or weeks in one patch of ocean, reporting the whole way, for a fraction of what a crewed vessel costs to keep there.
Pacific · Atlantic
Shipping lanes
Persistent presence along trade routes: traffic, conditions and imagery from inside the lane rather than from a satellite pass.
Bahamas · Gulf · Caribbean
Hurricane alleys
Pre‑positioned sensors in the water before a storm's track is certain, sailing clear or holding as the forecast firms up.
Coasts · Bays · Estuaries
Coastal monitoring
Repeatable survey lines close to shore, launched from a beach or a dinghy, with no fuel, no wake and no crew.
Development platform
Tackron Mk1
The vessel we are sailing today, on which the autonomy, communications and control software are being proven at sea.
| Length overall | 950 mm hull, single sail rig |
|---|---|
| Propulsion | Sail; servo‑driven rudder and sheet winch |
| Power | Solar‑charged LiFePO4 |
| Communications | LTE‑M / NB‑IoT cellular; NB‑IoT non‑terrestrial (satellite) on the same modem; Iridium as its direct‑to‑device service opens |
| Navigation | GNSS, tilt‑compensated compass, wind vane, heel and pitch |
| Autonomy | Waypoint routes up to 100 points; per‑leg tacking width; end‑of‑route hold; mission continues on loss of link |
| Payload | Still imagery over the link; expansion for additional sensors |
| Control | iOS app and web dashboard; push alerts for overpower, drift and positioning faults |
Mk1 is a development platform. Production hulls and payload options are in design; specifications will be published as they are fixed.
Company
Built in Miami, tested on Biscayne Bay.
Tackron is an engineering company founded in Miami in 2026. We design the hull, the electronics, the firmware, the server and the apps ourselves, because a boat left alone at sea is only as good as the weakest piece someone else made.
The name is the job. To tack is to work a sailboat upwind in a zigzag, and doing that well without a hand on the helm is the hard part of letting a boat go.
Our founder has spent his career shipping software and hardware: PCB design through injection‑molded production, native apps, and open‑source protocol work. The sail drone brings those together on one small boat.
We are talking with satellite and semiconductor partners about open‑ocean coverage, and with the first customers about where they need eyes on the water.
Contact
Tell us where you need a boat.
hello@tackron.comCoverage questions, partnerships, pilot programs and press. We read everything and answer the ones that are about the ocean.