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The drone industry is evolving at a pace that traditional manufacturing simply cannot keep up with. Design cycles are compressed, payload requirements shift constantly, and weight constraints are unforgiving, every gram saved translates directly into flight time. It is within this demanding environment that HP‘s MultiJet Fusion (MJF) technology has quietly established itself as a production-grade solution, not merely a prototyping tool.
Gino Balistreri, who leads HP’s unmanned systems efforts globally, explained that the shift became apparent organically: “Around two to three years ago, we actually started seeing a lot of parts being printed at our contract manufacturers.What began as an observation grew into a dedicated focus area. Today, HP supports drone manufacturers across agriculture, healthcare delivery, entertainment, surveillance, defense, and last-mile logistics, a breadth that underscores just how horizontally relevant our technology has become.”
The appeal of MJF for drone applications rests on a specific set of advantages: the ability to produce thin-walled, geometrically complex parts without support structures, combined with material properties, particularly in PA 12 and TPU, that balance weight reduction with genuine structural resilience. These are not incremental improvements. Balistreri cited one case where a manufacturer reduced total platform weight by 25%, a figure he described as “a massive amount of range” in drone terms.
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Across the Spectrum: Use Cases from FPV Racing to Field Deployment
The range of companies now relying on MJF for drone components spans the full breadth of the industry. Unusual Machines, the parent company behind the Rotor Riot brand, uses MJF-produced TPU parts for its SkyLite FPV drone, manufactured by Forecast 3D in San Diego. The flexibility and impact resistance of the material have made it particularly suited to the punishment FPV platforms routinely endure. Multiple components are printed in a single build, reducing assembly complexity and improving part consistency.
At the other end of the scale, UAV Works in Spain has built a collapsible multirotor where 96% of the structure is 3D printed, including the folding mechanisms. The platform folds small enough to carry in a backpack and was designed around MJF’s capability to produce the thinnest wall sections achievable in additive manufacturing, a critical consideration when every structural element must justify its weight.
Blueflite, based in Michigan, approached the technology from a payload and range perspective. Their last-mile delivery platform uses tilting motor arms to avoid pitching the fuselage during flight, an unusual configuration that placed complex geometry demands on the structure. Where traditional methods introduced constraints in strength or weight, MJF allowed the team to redesign freely. The result was a 25% weight reduction across 48 printed components, spanning body panels, battery covers, and landing gear. Meanwhile, Firestorm has taken a different route entirely, housing MJF capability within mobile manufacturing units, twenty-foot containers that can produce drone components and spare parts directly in the field.
The Bush Ranger: Designing for the Most Hostile Environment on Earth
The most compelling case presented came from Robert Miller, founder of EyeAbove, whose Bush Ranger drone was developed specifically for anti-poaching operations. The project did not begin as a technology demonstration, it began with a problem. Miller spent time at a nature reserve in South Africa and witnessed the daily reality of rangers attempting to track poachers through dense bush where visibility drops to just three or four meters.
“They’re actually fighting a losing battle in many cases,” Miller said. The solution seemed straightforward, providing rangers with aerial surveillance. In practice, it was anything but. After research and consultation with rangers and anti-poaching experts, a clear set of requirements emerged: long endurance, resistance to winds exceeding 60 km/h, rain, and dust, field repairability, minimal moving parts, easy transport, and a modular payload system capable of integrating new sensor technology over time.
The team evaluated composites, foam, SLA, FDM, and early-generation powder bed fusion before arriving at MJF on HP’s 5600 series. Each prior technology fell short in a different way. Composites required autoclaves and molds, making field repair impractical. Foam attracted ants and degraded quickly. SLA parts arrived broken in transit. FDM at useful wall thicknesses produced airframes that, in Miller’s words, “would creak and crack every time you picked it up.” The 5600 series resolved the tolerance and surface quality issues that had plagued earlier MJF attempts. “The first airframe that Barcelona printed had none of the problems we saw with any of the other airframes in the past,” Miller recalled. “It was rock solid.”
Critically, the EyeAbove team did not adapt an existing airframe design to MJF, they rebuilt from first principles. The aircraft features a self-supporting internal structure that maintains consistent 0.8mm wall sections throughout the skin, a geometry made possible precisely because powder bed fusion requires no support material.
The Bush Ranger is mostly 3D printed, fully modular, and designed so that any damaged section can be detached and replaced in the field. PA 12’s durability means minor damage is often repairable with superglue, a meaningful advantage in environments where the nearest qualified technician may be hundreds of kilometers away.
Beyond Conservation: A Platform Built for Scale
The Bush Ranger’s first deployment is planned for Kafue, Zambia, in partnership with the Endangered Wildlife Trust and International Crane Foundation, where it will monitor crane populations and critical habitats. From there, the program moves into the greater Kruger landscape, where a synthetic aperture radar for snare detection from altitude is being integrated.
What Miller did not anticipate was the commercial interest the project would generate. “Every time we’ve been to a show with HP, we’ve actually had the military come to us and say, we want that now.” The aircraft’s durability, modularity, and field serviceability appear to satisfy military procurement requirements that purpose-built defense platforms often struggle to meet at comparable cost. Commercial conversations are now underway across the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas.
The project also carries a deliberate social dimension. “We are going to continue to have poaching because a lot of these communities have nothing,” Miller acknowledged. Part of the deployment plan involves recruiting drone pilots and maintenance technicians from local communities, turning conservation technology into a route toward economic participation for populations that have historically been excluded from both the problem and the solution.
Additive Manufacturing Is Rewriting the Rules of Drone Development
Traditional drone manufacturing has a structural problem: design cycles are compressed, weight budgets are unforgiving, and platforms must be serviceable far from any factory. HP’s MultiJet Fusion addresses all three, not as a prototyping shortcut, but as a production-grade platform serving manufacturers from FPV racing to defense surveillance with the same technology and materials.
The broader industry has been arriving at similar conclusions through different routes. Firestorm Labs has been leveraging 3D printing to enable rapid, localized production of drone components, reducing reliance on centralized factories and improving adaptability in contested environments.
On the defense propulsion side, Beehive Industries completed high-altitude testing of its fully additive Frenzy engine ahead of schedule, with hardware inspections showing minimal wear after mission-length runs, results the company cites as evidence of the durability enabled by its additive-first manufacturing strategy.
At the military field level, soldiers from the U.S. Army‘s 173rd Airborne Brigade have been building and deploying 3D printed FPV drones on-site, combining printed parts with off-the-shelf components, cutting individual drone costs to between $400 and $500, a fraction of conventional procurement.
What connects these efforts is a shared recognition that the competitive advantage of additive manufacturing in drone applications goes beyond cost per part. It is about iteration speed, freedom from tooling constraints, and the ability to manufacture or repair hardware wherever the mission demands, in a lab, on a base, or in a backpack in the African bush.
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