Collins Aerospace this week launched the 2025 edition of its Powered by Collins Initiative to provide collaborative opportunities for small- and medium-sized deep tech enterprises. Announcing the third annual program during the Aero India show in Bangalore, the RTX group company said the key focus for selected projects will be material informatics and quantum-enabled navigation for civil aviation and defense applications.

From February 12, proposals are being accepted for companies wanting to work with Collins engineers in three key areas: accelerating the discovery and use of new lightweight polymer composite materials; helping airports to recover from irregular disruptive operational events; and dealing with safety risks to commercial flights from unexpected navigational deviations and false positive navigation errors.

The closing date for receiving applications is May 16 and Collins will hold a “Collaboration Day” event in June. The proof-of-concept projects will be selected in August, at which point the companies will finalize the scope of what they aim to demonstrate.

According to Collins, the purpose of the program is to get novel solutions to its customers faster, and it some cases the company provides funding. The first annual collaborative process was run in 2023 and Collins said that it is now in advanced discussions with a number of participating companies about commercializing the outcomes from joint work.

For example, in 2024 software group Parasanti contributed to Collins’ RapidEdge Mission System for Uncrewed Launched Effects air vehicles. In March, the Texas-based company demonstrated how its Unite microservice for sharing containerized data from sensors could be used to “teach” multiple vehicles how to operate during flight missions without human intervention. The two companies’ teams took just three months to modify the existing Parasanti applications to be integrated with the RapidEdge technology.