Leading defense technology startup Anduril has developed a new product designed to address the proliferation of low-cost, high-power aerial threats.
The product is called the Roadrunner, a modular, autonomous vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aerial vehicle with a dual gas engine designed for low cost. Anduril has also developed a variant called the Roadrunner-Munition or Roadrunner-M, a “high-explosive interceptor”, meaning it can carry a warhead and also destroy aerial threats defensively.
The Roadrunner is unusual in both appearance and ability: it can take off, track and destroy targets. If there is no need to intercept the target, the vehicle can autonomously return to base for refueling and reuse. As Anduril’s chief strategy officer, Chris Brose, put it in a recent interview, “We’ve basically built a fighter jet weapon that lands like a Falcon 9.”
The product was developed in response to the rise of fast-moving, autonomous aerial weapons that can be produced in high volume and at very low cost, a new type of threat, Brose said. Unlike other solutions today and the legacy missile systems that preceded it, the Roadrunner-M is also reusable.
“In my opinion, this is the first retrievable weapon ever used,” Brose said. “This is a very nice thing. The possibility of development […] retrieve it and reuse it if you don’t actually use it in an operation to kill another drone, it completely changes how operators can fight with this ability. Today, they have a limited number of interceptors and if they decide to hit, they will not take it back.”
There are many other significant improvements over legacy systems, Anduril says: faster launch and takeoff time, three times the warhead payload capacity, ten times the effective range and three times the flexibility in G-forces. Like the rest of Anduril’s family of systems, the Roadrunner-M can be controlled by Lattice, Andruil’s command and control software with artificial intelligence, or integrated into existing architectures.
The other big advantage is for the operator: when facing a fast-moving threat, the Roadrunner can launch immediately, image it, and then receive a signal whether to engage or not. Because the product is reusable and recoverable, operators can act without the fear that they could lose an expensive asset.
Brose said the company has been working with an undisclosed U.S. government partner since it began designing the Roadrunner about two years ago.
“[National defense] He’s often rightfully stereotyped as just being too stiff, too slow, too unimaginative, too insufferable,” Brose said. “I think as a company Anduril is the antithesis of that and Roadrunner is the embodiment of the kind of enthusiasm that we think is in national defense and we’re very keen to try to bring back.”
