Anduril Industries on Thursday said it has acquired Blue Force Technologies, a small company that is developing a jet-powered drone aircraft that gives Anduril a potential entrée into future Defense Department programs like the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) that could also feature the company’s software for autonomous operations.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Blue Force Technologies is based in North Carolina where it is developing the Fury UAS, which undergone a ground test for its carbon fiber composite propulsion flowpath system and completed a successful flight-test of its software aboard a simulator test aircraft.
Anduril describes Fury has having “fighter like performance,” which is the kind of capability the Air Force is seeking in a future CCA that would have a degree of autonomy but also fly missions in teaming arrangements with advanced manned combat aircraft to potentially serve in strike and sensing roles in degraded and heavily contested operating environments, and to help keep human pilots out of harm’s way.
“Anduril is extremely excited about what we’re hearing from the government about Collaborative Combat Aircraft,” Christian Brose, the company’s chief strategy officer, told Defense Daily
. “That is a type of capability that needs to exist. It can and should be operationally game changing. And you know, we have been investing for years in many of the underlying technologies that would be required to make something like Collaborative Combat Aircraft or manned-unmanned teaming types of systems operationally viable and relevant.”
A key underlying technology for the CCA and manned-unmanned teaming efforts is Anduril’s Lattice operating system, which allows unmanned systems to perform autonomous operations singly or as part of a team. In May, Anduril introduced an evolved version of the artificial intelligence-based open systems software platform and dubbed it Lattice for Mission Autonomy that allows large-scale integration of autonomous systems for dynamic operations under human supervision.
Fury is a Group 5 UAS, a category of drones that have a maximum gross take-off weight greater than 1,320 pounds and an operating altitude above 18,000 feet.
Palmer Luckey, Anduril’s founder, tweeted early Thursday morning that Fury can pull “9Gs at Mach 0.95 for a tiny fraction of the cost of similarly performant fighter aircraft.” On its website, Anduril said the use of commercial off-the-shelf subsystems and the digital workflow used to take Fury from concept through manufacture and verification will allow production to scale rapidly.
Anduril already produces smaller drones to conduct counter-UAS operations and the Ghost vertical-take-off-and-landing drone that can perform intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. The company also has an autonomous underwater vehicle called DIVE.
The Fury aircraft gives Anduril another in-house platform to integrate with Lattice, although the company has developed the operating system as an open system that can integrate with other vendors’ drones as well. Anduril did not disclose when it acquired Blue Force Technologies but Brose said “we have not wasted any time in…bringing Lattice for Mission Autonomy and Fury together.”
Lattice for Mission Autonomy is fielded on robotic systems worldwide “doing all manner of missions autonomously in tactical and operational environments” and is “ready to go now,” he said.
He pointed out that if the DoD wants to acquire Fury and use another company’s software then Anduril will support that.
In addition to Fury, which possibly at some point in the not-to-distant future will have its first flight test, Blue Force Technologies also has core capabilities in composite manufacturing, digital design and manufacturing, all of which are now reside make up a “team inside of Anduril to rapidly develop new capabilities, aircraft or otherwise, that are going to meet emerging needs,” Brose said.
Blue Force Technologies has 90 employees, all of whom retain their roles within Anduril.
The Fury UAS is being developed under a contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory for Air Force pilots to train against in adversarial air missions. The Air Force awarded Blue Force Technologies an initial $9 million contract that includes options to build up to four aircraft and complete initial flight testing.