Anduril Industries has developed, and is about to begin production of, a speedy jet-powered, highly maneuverable, and recoverable autonomous air vehicle (AAV) with vertical take-off-and-landing capabilities that includes a variant for air defense against a wide range of targets and another that performs like other unmanned systems and hosts different payloads to accomplish an array of missions today and in the future.
Development of the Roadrunner and Roadrunner-Munition AAVs was self-funded beginning nearly two years ago and demonstrates Anduril’s bold approach as a fast-moving disruptor in the defense industry, creating solutions on its own based on what it thinks the Defense Department needs irrespective of formal requirements.
“Imagine if they put out an RFP and said, ‘Yeah, we want a vertical takeoff and landing recoverable missile and we want it to be able to intercept and follow targets and feed information back to me,’” Palmer Luckey, Anduril’s founder, told reporters on Nov. 29 ahead of the public release on Dec. 1. “They just never would have put out a proposal like that. It would have seemed like a joke to people in industry. So, I’m glad we did it.”
Luckey said the various DoD requirements for air defense are not “hitting” what Anduril thinks “are most important,” which are autonomy, reusability, and low cost.
Several years ago, when Anduril was looking at future air defense needs, the immediate concern was small quadcopter drones or ballistic missile threats, Christian Brose, the company’s chief strategy officer, said during the virtual meeting with reporters. But the company, through its work developing and building systems to detect and defeat threats from drones, saw that the future threat would be mass produced, low-cost drones and cruise missiles like Iran’s Shahed loitering munitions Russia is using against Ukraine, he said.
In addition to countering large unmanned aircraft in the Group 3 through 5 categories, Roadrunner-M can also destroy full-size aircraft, Luckey said, noting that the system would layer in well with a Patriot air defense system, saving the more expensive Patriot missiles for higher value targets.
The Roadrunner variants were designed based on where the threats were going and where they will go next, Brose said. He outlined three “core attributes” that set Roadrunner apart from other unmanned systems and air defense weapons.
First is the low-cost, which allows for high volume production and fielding, Brose said. The current per unit cost is the “low hundreds of thousands of dollars” and will come down as production scales but how low the floor can go is not known yet and will be sorted out as the company gains experience manufacturing Roadrunner, Luckey chimed in.
Luckey said that Anduril is building the twin turbojet engines for Roadrunner, noting the engines are the “most power dense” that he knows of, and quick starting, going from cold to launch in seconds.
“And because we’re building those, we can control the performance, but even more importantly we control the cost,” he said. Anduril is now in a position with Roadrunner where it can put more focus on cost reduction, he said.
Autonomy in the air vehicles is the second key attribute, reducing manpower needs and enabling a lot of Roadrunners to be used at once to counter a high volume of threats, Brose said. The system has on-board sensors to detect targets, the official said.
Anduril is early stages in the autonomy “journey,” Brose said, adding that it will “get to multi-ship operations, collaborative operations, those kinds of concepts of operation.”
Recoverability of the air vehicles using VTOL capabilities is the third characteristic that differentiates Roadrunner from other systems, Brose said. Roadrunner is the first weapon that can be recovered, he said.
If one or more Roadrunner-Ms are launched to intercept a target and the operator determines via the sensor feedback that there is no threat or fewer threats than thought, some or all the air vehicles can return to base for reuse later. One operator can supervise multiple air vehicles.
“So instead of having to fire multiple interceptors at one threat, you can now deploy multiple interceptors to go out and loiter to gather additional intelligence to be…on site in a timely way in the case that you actually want to employ them,” Brose said. “And then for those Roadrunners that aren’t employed, you can recall them, recover them, land them, refuel them and reuse them. And that’s something that we’ve done consistently in all of our daily testing.”
Some Roadrunners have “dozens of flights on them,” including “many live fires flights as well,” Luckey said. After landing, a Roadrunner air vehicle can be refueled and relaunched “inside a couple minutes,” he said.
The air vehicles are stored and launched from a highly engineered container called Nest, which houses the system and provides maintenance and environmental control for use in any conditions. Anduril did not provide dimensions but Luckey said Roadrunner is shorter than he is, suggesting that the system is about five-feet tall. It looks like a mini-launch vehicle.
“There’s a lot of drone-in-a-box companies,” Luckey said. “I don’t think that there’s many maintenance-hangar-in-a-box companies for jet aircraft.”
Roadrunner and its Nest container are designed to be expeditionary and can be handled and lifted by an individual. Up to four Nests can be placed on one 463L pallet, the standardized pallet for transporting military air cargo, Anduril said. These pallets can also be transported on tactical vehicles.
Roadrunner flies at high subsonic speeds, has High-G maneuverability, and can carry different payloads depending on the mission such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and electronic warfare. The Anduril officials declined to discuss specific capabilities around speed and range. The system is optimized for a wide range of missions and threats and is future-proof as well, they said.
“The bottom line is that we’re just getting started in terms of unlocking the performance that exists in Roadrunner from the standpoint of speed, turning capability, autonomy, different types of payloads and effectors that can be integrated into the air vehicle, reduction of cost,” Brose said. He added that “I can’t think of a cooler capability that exists out there right now than Roadrunner.”
Anduril released a video of Roadrunner-M in a test where the munition destroyed a jet-powered, fixed-wing unmanned Group 3 target vehicle. The company says Roadrunner-M “autonomously computes optimal flight path to intercept the target.”
Anduril has a U.S. customer for Roadrunner-M, which Luckey said has been “operationally assessed,” and will begin low-rate initial production shortly for the customer with the expectation to scale to thousands of units. The company also has customers for the Roadrunner UAS variant, he said, without disclosing them.
The government has been in the loop throughout the development of Roadrunner, Brose said.
Anduril is confident of a growing customer base and demand. Luckey said the company is “speculatively investing our money in further additional manufacturing capability for other customers.”
In October, Anduril hired a former
Tesla [TSLA] manufacturing official to lead its manufacturing as it looks to scale production of its products, including Roadrunner. Citing the new hire, Brose said Anduril is focused on mass producing Roadrunner and finding ways to lower costs and complexity.
Brose and Luckey said that the Roadrunner variants fit will with DoD’s new Replicator Initiative that aims to acquire thousands of autonomous, attritable unmanned systems to help counter China in the Indo-Pacific region.
Roadrunner can work with Anduril’s Lattice artificial intelligence powered command and control software or be integrated into existing air defense radars, sensors, and architectures, the company said.