Epirus last Thursday said it and Anduril Industries this month completed the integration of Epirus’ Leonidas high-powered microwave counter-drone system with Anduril’s Lattice command and control platform as part a technology assessment effort for the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWL).
Work between the companies and the lab began in the fall of 2022 and showcased the interoperability of Leonidas with the Lattice system, which Anduril also bills as an open systems platform. The integration work was funded and enabled by the MCWL, the Office of Naval Research, and the Defense Department’s Defense Innovation Unit.
Epirus is developing Leonidas to defeat individual drones or swarms of unmanned aircraft systems for pennies on the shot versus more expensive kinetic solutions. The startup defense company is currently working under a $66 million Army contract to provide Leonidas prototypes by early 2024 for field evaluations that the company hopes will lead to a program or record and possibly operational deployments to meet urgent requirements.
Lattice can integrate with other sensors and weapons platforms to create an open architecture foundation for all aspects of counter-UAS operations, including threat detect, track, identify and defeat, as well as layer in additional air defense missions, and share the information across a network. Anduril’s artificial intelligence-based technology also provides automated sensor processing and fusion.
Leonidas has also been integrated with
Northrop Grumman’s [NOC] Forward Area Air Defense Command and Control Platform for short-range air defense, the General Dynamics [GD] Stryker armored wheeled fighting vehicle, and DroneShield’s multi-sensor DroneSentry C-UAS system. Leonidas features an open application programming interface to integrate with government and commercially provided systems.
Separately, Epirus recently hosted Army soldiers from the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office for what the company calls a “soldier touchpoint” event to gather user feedback to ensure Leonidas is “soldier-centric,” Mike Hiatt, senior vice president for engineering at Epirus, told Defense Daily last week.
The soldiers included those that would setup, operate, maintain, and provide logistics for Leonidas “to see how they would actually work and operate and fight with the system,” he said.
Hiatt said that Epirus put the same focus on function, utility, reliability, and maintainability as it does system performance of Leonidas, which he added is a “differentiator” between the company and the rest of the defense industry. The touchpoint events are an opportunity to gather “user stories as we do our agile development” and to ensure that “we’re considering their user perspectives at the very beginning,” he said.