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Leading defense lawyers tech startupAndurilhas develop a fresh product designed to take on the proliferation of humiliated - cost , high-pitched - powered aerial threat .
The product is call Roadrunner , a modular , twin - jet - powered autonomous vertical take - off and landing ( VTOL ) tune vehicle that ’s design for blue costs . Anduril has also prepare a variant call Roadrunner - Munition , or Roadrunner - M , a “ high - volatile interceptor , ” meaning it can carry a warhead and also defensively destroy aery threats .
Roadrunner is unusual both in appearance and potentiality : it can take off , follow and destroying targets ; if there is no need to intercept the object , the fomite can autonomously manoeuver back to base for refueling and reuse . As Anduril ’s principal strategy officer Chris Brose put it in a recent interview , “ We ’ve basically build a hero jet-propelled plane weapon that lands like a Falcon 9 . ”
The product was built in reception to the rise of fast - move , autonomous airy weapon that can be produced at a high volume and very modest cost , a Modern kind of threat , Brose say . Unlike other solutions today , and the legacy missile systems that preceded them , the Roadrunner - M can also be reused .
“ To my intellect , this is the first recoverable weapon that has ever been fielded , ” Brose sound out . “ That is a pretty cool matter . The power to deploy [ … ] recuperate it and reuse it if you do n’t really employ it in an operation to drink down another drone , completely modify how operators can struggle with this capability . Today , they have a limited number of interceptors and if they decide to slay go , they are not get it back . ”
There are a handful of other major betterment versus legacy systems , Anduril says : faster launch and take - off metre , three time greater warhead consignment capacity , 10 times effective range and three times not bad maneuverability in G - forces . Like the quietus of Anduril ’s family of systems , Roadrunner - M can be control by Lattice , Anduril ’s AI - powered command and ascendance software program , or incorporate into existing architectures .
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The other large benefit is to the wheeler dealer : When faced with a fast - move menace , Roadrunner can launch immediately , fancy it and then experience a sign whether or not to engage . Because the Cartesian product is recyclable and recoverable , hustler can act without the fear that they could drop off an expensive asset .
Brose said the company ’s been working in curl - stone’s throw with an unnamed U.S. governing better half since it started design Roadrunner around two years ago .
“ [ interior defense ] often justifiedly gets the stereotype for just being very stodgy , very slow , very unimaginative , very unexciting , ” Brose said . “ I think as a company Anduril is the antithesis of that and Roadrunner is the embodiment of the kind of excitement that we consider exists in national defense and we ’re very eager to test to bring back . ”
