Anduril Industries is a new American defense company that specializes in autonomous drone systems. They excel at artificial intelligence, software, drones and robotics. Anduril’s major products include unmanned aerial systems (UAS), counter-UAS (CUAS), semi-portable autonomous surveillance systems, and networked command and control software.
Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey created the Oculus Rift which was sold to Facebook for $2 billion. Anduril is now valued at $8.8 billion.
In April 2021, Anduril acquired Area-I, a company producing drones capable of being launched from larger aircraft.
In June 2023, Anduril agreed to acquire a rocket engine company Adranos, giving it access to technology for developing solid rocket motors for missiles and space launch. The company acquired North Carolina-based autonomous aircraft developer Blue Force Technologies in September 2023.
Anvil, also known as Interceptor, is an unmanned combat aerial vehicle quadrotor designed principally to attack other unmanned aerial vehicles. When launched, Anvil locates target drones using computer vision, and can be commanded to kinetically ram targets by its operator. The drone can reportedly reach speeds of up to 200 mph (320 km/h). Anduril is also developing versions to attack larger targets like helicopters or cruise missiles. Anvil can be integrated into Anduril’s Lattice system. A detonating version called the Anvil-M was unveiled in October 2023.
Lattice is a software platform that can use artificial intelligence to classify objects by ingesting and fusing data from disparate sensors, including from Anduril’s own platforms and those of third parties. Lattice has been used to control Anduril equipment for national border and military base surveillance.
The Sentry Tower is a 33-foot (10 meter) tall solar-powered portable surveillance tower. The Sentry contains a camera, communications antennae, radar, and thermal imaging equipment. The tower operates autonomously and feeds data back into Anduril’s Lattice system, which can classify moving objects and targets in the imagery. When disassembled, the Sentry can fit into a pickup truck, and can reportedly be re-assembled in under an hour. The CBP says agents can set up individual systems at the border in under 2 hours. The Sentry Tower and associated systems such as Lattice have been referred to as a virtual border wall or smart wall.
Fury is a long-range, subsonic, stealthy military drone with 17-foot wingspan suited for surveillance and combat operations.
The Roadrunner is a 6 ft (1.8 m)-long twin turbojet-powered delta-winged craft capable of high subsonic speeds and extreme maneuverability; company officials describe it as somewhere between an autonomous drone and a reusable missile. The basic version can be fitted with modular payloads such as intelligence and reconnaissance sensors, while the Roadrunner-M has an explosive warhead to intercept UAS, cruise missiles, and manned aircraft. Both models can take off and land vertically from a dedicated container, and the munition version can be recovered if not detonated. Although specifications are not known, it is purported to have three times the warhead payload, three times the maneuverability under g-forces, and 10 times the one-way range of comparable air vehicles.
Anduril revealed the Roadrunner in December 2023, saying that it had been in development for two years, and that they were about to begin low-rate production for an order of hundreds of units. A single unit costs in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars but price is expected to drop as more get produced.
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Along with acquisition of rockets, it almost sounds like this is just the entry point to fund a system that could, in the slightly longer timeframe, defend or attack orbital assets and, in the longer run, commence asteroid mining.
You see Musk doing something similar when he creates SpaceX to take stuff to Mars while paying for itself as a commercial space transport, the Boring Company to drill underground cities on Mars while paying for itself by digging subways and such, Tesla to provide vehicles, robot workers, batteries, etc. for a colony on Mars while paying for itself with electric cars, electric driverless cars, high-end batteries, and robots, Neuralink so the colonists can directly control all the equipment they need to survive in a highly dangerous environment, flamethrowers for burning the alien eggs when their hidden caverns are breached by the Boring Company machines, and Twitter (X) for convincing people that alien egg caverns are just an urban myth after the flamethrowers have fried them out existence.
The rockets are for military uses, for warfare, not for reaching orbit. Air to air, air to ground, for uses with their platforms.
Gold bars on Psyche are too expensive to bring back, the Moon is where we will mine for water, then metals and O2, and Anduril has other things to do.
Love these guys, send it to Ukraine!