Canadian Shield develops Canadian-controlled autonomous and optionally uncrewed defence systems for contested and remote environments. It works from Alberta on land and floor space the group holds, and the engineering behind it never had a radio to depend on.
Canadian Shield builds a four-domain fleet of uncrewed systems for the one condition most makers treat as an exception: the radio is jammed and GPS is gone.
The division designs for that condition first. Where incumbents bolt jam-resistance onto platforms that depend on radio, Canadian Shield rules the link out at the design stage. Where they win on exquisite single-shot systems, the division competes on unit cost and salvo depth, on an owned 5-axis shop that cuts its own moulds. Counter-UAS is a manufacturing problem before it is an aerospace one, and the division was built around that order of operations.
Four platform families carry the fleet: Goose in the air, KAOS on the ground, CS-310 on the water, CS-410 underground. Platform designs are held as proprietary know-how and trade secret, and patent applications are pending on the platform designs, among them a coil-tube drive system and a polymer foam system.
Every program on the roster is listed on programs.
Shield names the work. Canadian names where the iron comes from and where it is cut, and it works the way Swiss-made works everywhere. The Canadian Shield itself is the country's bedrock, and the name ties the division to the underground family the group already knows how to build.
One chassis philosophy runs across the four domains, and outside the two ruled mine clearance configurations every platform runs the three no-radio guidance tiers. They are carriers. Nothing in the fleet carries a warhead, and nothing in it operates a weapon.
The other half of the enterprise is not a new vehicle. A removable unit sits in the seat of a machine a customer already runs, works that machine's own controls, and lifts back out when the job is done.
One electrical and mechanical seam runs across the platform family, and the wiring that carries it is built on the group's own floor rather than bought in.
Wired Industries builds the UAV wiring harnesses. The physical build side of the common interface standard stays on the group's own floor.
A common wiring and mounting interface standard runs across the platform family, adapted from established MIL-STD practice. Payloads and subsystems move between platforms instead of being re-engineered for each one.
Adaptation and integration engineering is a standing capability of the division. Partner payloads and sensors are brought onto the fleet against that common standard, on the division's side of the seam, so a partner integrates once, against one interface.
The group has run heavy equipment for three decades, so the division's questions start with the machine rather than with the software. The tooling is cut on the group's own machines, so a design is drawn against the tools the shop already has. The five capabilities the division delivers across both halves are set out on capabilities.
The capability underneath Canadian Shield is older than the division. Thirty years of horizontal-directional-drilling engineering built it, a trade whose whole discipline was steering tooling through rock and soil with no line of sight.
The method was walkover locating from the surface and wireline steering to close the loop, reaching ground nothing else could reach. That history left more behind it than experience.
A working 5-axis CNC machine shop once cut drilling tooling. It now cuts the division's own injection moulds. Every era of that shop has been the same trade: precision metal cut for hard environments, downhole, underground and now airborne.
A chassis discipline the group has already designed and operated for a living, carried out of the drilling business alongside the shop and the drawings.
Decades of real work sit on paper in an engineering drawing estate. None of it was drawn for defence. All of it transfers.
No GPS, no line of sight, no radio signal that survives rock. The drilling industry has worked that problem for two generations. Engineers who spent careers answering how you steer something you cannot see and cannot talk to do not start from zero when the radio is jammed and the satellites are gone. The division exists on that observation.
It also dictates how the division builds. Platforms operate without radio dependence because the heritage never had a radio to depend on. The tooling that builds them is cut in-house, on machines the group owns, and a shop floor standing in steel and concrete does not wait on an outside vendor to iterate.
The division works from approximately 40,000 ft² of manufacturing facility on industrial lands and remote Alberta land, both held within the group.
A full machine shop with a full manufacturing history behind it, headed by a 5-axis CNC machining centre and backed by a PET recycling and injection line.
The facility sits on industrial lands and was formerly a licensed cannabis production site. It inherits that building's perimeter security, access control and monitoring instead of starting from an empty shell.
The facility and the ground are one site. Launch, recovery and flight-trial infrastructure sits on the group's own land, under Class G uncontrolled airspace and within sight of the floor where the parts are made.
One site for the shop and the trial ground shortens the loop that matters most. Cut the insert, shoot the part, take it out to the line, and bring what the line teaches back to the drawing. The production story runs stage by stage on the manufacturing page, from the mould shop through the materials line to the Forward Manufacturing Cell.
Canadian Shield builds two things, and they are two doors of one company. A four-domain fleet of uncrewed carriers designed without a radio, and CDNS Autonomy, a removable operator that works a machine the customer already runs.
The fleet. Four families carry it. Goose flies tube-launched pneumatic interceptor rounds, and the lead round flies with no battery, no motor and no onboard guidance electronics. KAOS works the ground on tracks, a diesel-electric carrier where the engine charges and the motors drive, and where the deck takes standardized mission modules that bolt on and change in the field. CS-310 and CS-320 are two moulded low-signature platforms on the water, the fleet's youngest domain, where the manufacturing story and the low-signature story are the same story. CS-410 goes down the hole so a person does not have to, on boring, tunnel recon, buried sensing and pipeline riding. The four domains open from the fleet.
The seat. CDNS Autonomy converts machines instead of replacing them. A removable unit sits on the operator's seat under the machine's own lap belt, works the joysticks, levers, pedals and switches the manufacturer fitted, reads the dash with a camera, and lifts back out. Nothing is cut, nothing is reprogrammed, and the same fleet serves crewed and uncrewed work. Each machine is surveyed, fitted with its own kit, calibrated and recorded, one qualified configuration at a time. The mechanism, the authority order and the safety architecture are carried in full on CDNS Autonomy.
Eleven programs across Air, Water and Underground, moulded and machined on the group's own machines and sold by family. Outside the two ruled mine clearance configurations, every platform runs the three no-radio guidance tiers and nothing transmits; nothing in the fleet carries a warhead or operates a weapon. The fleet opens each family.
Responder CS-810 works the fire ground, structural collapse, hazmat, flood and wildfire earthworks, and rubble and route clearance for civil agencies. Defender CS-820 takes the seat of the iron a defence engineering unit already runs, military-pattern vehicles included, each one surveyed, fitted, calibrated and recorded like any other machine. CDNS Autonomy carries both.
| The fleet | CDNS Autonomy | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Uncrewed carriers Canadian Shield designs and builds. | The operator for a machine the customer already runs. |
| What it covers | Air, Water and Underground: eleven programs in all, and CDNS KAOS on the ground. | Responder CS-810 for emergency services, Defender CS-820 for defence engineering. |
| Where the work happens | On the group's own floor. The moulds are cut in the shop and the parts are shot on the line. | On the customer's machine. Each one is surveyed, fitted with its own kit, calibrated and recorded. |
| How it is sold | By family. | As one surveyed machine configuration. |
| What it never does | No warhead, no fuze and no energetic material anywhere in it, and nothing in it operates a weapon. | Never operates a weapon. Never fires anything. |
| The front door | The fleet | CDNS Autonomy |
One doctrine governs both columns, and nothing in either half operates a weapon.
The fleet is moulded and machined on the group's own machines and sold by family. The conversion line is engineered onto equipment a customer already owns, one qualified configuration at a time.
Nobody in harm's way is the reason both halves exist. The fleet is uncrewed by construction, and the conversion line takes the person out of a seat that is already there.
The doctrine is settled at the design stage. It does not change per customer, per domain or per contract, and it is the shortest description of what the division builds and what it refuses.
The order runs one way. A planner proposes and never commands an actuator. An approval is bounded, and a qualified person gives it. An independent safety layer can remove motion energy without asking permission from anything above it.
The fleet's own statement of this doctrine is on doctrine, and the mechanism it governs is on technology: the three guidance tiers, the perception boundary and the seat.
Canadian Shield is Canadian in heritage and Canadian in manufacture, and it sells from Canada outward. “Canadian” here works the way “Swiss-made” works everywhere: a trust and origin signal rather than a market restriction.
Canada first. The sequence is deliberate: Canada, then allies. Sovereignty is told here as a manufacturing story rather than a flag on a brochure, and the control it rests on is set out on sovereignty.
The same problem, everywhere. The threat picture the doctrine answers is jammed spectrum, drone saturation and denied environments, and none of that is uniquely Canadian. Neither is the answer. What follows is a doctrine fit rather than a target list, and no relationship with any foreign government, military or company is implied.
Allies who share Canada's intelligence picture share its threat picture: the same jammed, drone-saturated airspace assumptions the no-radio doctrine was built for.
Allied nations closest to active drone-saturated threat environments face the cost-exchange problem at its sharpest, and it is the fight non-explosive carriers were designed for.
Allies operating in cold, remote, infrastructure-poor terrain face conditions that parallel the Alberta environment this fleet is designed for.
The far end of the map runs to allies whose conditions meet the doctrine in part. The map is drawn by doctrine, and Canada stands at the anchor of it.
Export posture is counsel-first. Every shipment is classified and permitted on its own, under the Export and Import Permits Act, assessed against Canada's Export Control List and administered by Global Affairs Canada. That work is done with counsel, against a specific order, as it is by every Canadian defence exporter. Enquiries are screened before any discussion.
Canada proves the system, and the origin travels with it. The map above is a doctrine map, not a customer map.
The division draws on an Alberta industrial workforce and supplier network. The trades behind the fleet matter more here than an org chart.
Canadian Shield is a division of Sustainable Infrastructure Group Ltd. One desk answers for it, and every contract is with that company.
The list is specific. 5-axis CNC machining, mould and fixture craft, a PET recycling and injection line, thirty years of directional-drilling doctrine, tracked-chassis heritage, and an Alberta industrial workforce and supplier network that has run heavy equipment for a living.
Named contacts go to screened enquiries. Direct lines, named points of contact and the facility address are shared once an enquiry is screened, and visits are by arrangement after that. A public page carries the route in; the directory opens after screening.
One desk, for one company. Both halves answer from it, and a person reads every message and answers.
Nothing sent to the division creates an obligation on either side, and nothing on this site is a commitment or a representation to any government body. What happens to what you send is set out in the privacy notice.
Canadian Shield engineers and builds uncrewed systems in Alberta, on a floor with its own 5-axis machine shop and injection-moulding line, with three decades of heavy equipment behind it.
What gets designed and written here goes into a mould, a launcher or a hull, and then it gets run. The division is looking for engineers and programmers, and it does not post positions.
Engineers work airframes and hulls, launchers, tooling and moulds, tracked chassis and coiled-tubing plant, and the fire-control stack that cues them. Programmers work preset guidance, fibre-guided human-in-loop control and passive optical-AI perception, with no radio and no GPS in the loop by design. If that constraint reads as the interesting part of the job, write.
How to write is on the careers page. One channel, and a person reads every letter and answers.
A buyer, a partner or a regulator reading this page is checking a company before a catalogue: who owns the floor, who cuts the tooling, and who answers for the system afterwards. That conversation is worth having early, while a requirement can still move.
An enquiry opens a conversation about doctrine fit, integration and scope, on the posture set out above. There is no cart and no checkout anywhere on this site, and no order exists until a contract does.
The route in, and what opens at each stage of it, is set out on procurement. Government and ministries, primes and OEMs, suppliers, and emergency services each have a door on the enquiries form. Press and analysts reach the same desk, and anything that does not fit a door goes to the contact page. Both halves answer from that one desk: the fleet on one side, CDNS Autonomy on the other.
