WASHINGTON — Anduril Industries unveiled its latest autonomous system, Roadrunner — a reusable aircraft that may carry a variety of payloads, takeoff vertically and intercept and destroy airborne threats.
The California-based technology firm revealed two variants of the system Dec. 1. The baseline Roadrunner can quickly launch and fly at high subsonic speeds and its payloads could be reconfigured for quite a lot of missions.
Roadrunner-M is a munitions version of the system designed to guard against uncrewed aerial system threats. The corporate says the vehicle can rapidly locate, track and disable adversary systems and its interceptors could be recovered, refueled and reused in the event that they’re not deployed.
“As an alternative of getting to fireside multiple interceptors at one threat, you may now deploy multiple interceptors to exit and loiter, to assemble additional intelligence, to be on site in a timely way within the case that you simply actually need to employ them,” Chief of Strategy Chris Brose told reporters Nov. 28.
Palmer Luckey, founding father of Anduril , told reporters throughout the same embargoed briefing the corporate has been designing, constructing and demonstrating the Roadrunner systems with its own funding for 2 years and is about to start low-rate production through a contract with a U.S. customer.
Luckey declined to reveal the shopper, but said the initial order is for “a whole bunch of units” and he expects the corporate will quickly scale into the a whole bunch of 1000’s. Brose noted that the U.S. government has been closely watching the hassle and Roadrunner has demonstrated operational utility through a rigorous flight test program.
“Certainly one of our fundamental motivations as an organization has been to prove it after which discuss it,” Brose said. “I feel we’re in the beginning of that conversation on Roadrunner.”
Using uncrewed aircraft systems on the battlefield has expanded in recent times and the Defense Department is working to each leverage the potential of swarming drones in its own arsenal and counter increased threats from adversaries.
The Pentagon established the Joint Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office to develop a coordinated, long-term response to drone threats in 2019, and in August, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks revealed a brand new DoD initiative called Replicator to field 1000’s of autonomous systems over the following two years.
Brose said Roadrunner was designed with each of those challenges in mind.
“We’re very hopeful that the federal government will see on this capability what we see in it, which is a novel solution that’s built to be adaptable to where those threats are stepping into the near future – which, by the way in which, has been a process that’s been playing out over the past few years, and it’s just going to worsen,” he said.
Counter-drone systems
Fielding capabilities corresponding to drones and other high-need systems in larger quantities is a “critical challenge,” for DoD right away, Brose said, but he’s hopeful the department is serious about funding large-scale production efforts.
“Our belief and our hope is that that is a chance to actually produce this capability at scale, which is something we’re absolutely able to doing,” he said.
On cost, Luckey said a single Roadrunner is “within the low a whole bunch of 1000’s of dollars,” but the corporate expects that to drop because it produces the systems at a better rate.
“The more of those we make, the cheaper they get,” he said, adding that the corporate’s decision to construct its own turbojet engines somewhat than work with one other supplier will help it control cost and performance moving forward.
Brose noted that while Roadrunner-M may cost greater than other counter-drone systems, it could possibly address a wider range of threats, making it a lower cost alternative to missiles just like the Patriot, which cost about $4 million each.
“Roadrunner can are available and really fill a niche out there that is maybe possibly a bit more exquisite and a bit dearer than those low-end solutions, nevertheless it’s going to be an order of magnitude cheaper than a patriot missile,” he said. “That looks like a reasonably good deal to us.”
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a concentrate on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on a number of the Defense Department’s most important acquisition, budget and policy challenges.