Anduril Industries announced its Roadrunner and Roadrunner-Munition (Roadrunner-M) autonomous air vehicles in the US on 1 December.
Roadrunner is a low-cost modular, twin-jet autonomous air vehicle. Anduril says its Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) capability gives Roadrunner the flexibility to rapidly launch from and return to any location, pairing high subsonic speed with agility and stability. It says the modular payload system can carry a variety of constantly-updated payloads to accomplish broad sets of missions and is capable of being continuously updated to meet emerging threats.
Roadrunner-M is a high-explosive interceptor variant of Roadrunner for ground-based air defence (GBAD) that Anduril says can rapidly identify, intercept and destroy an array of aerial threats, or can be recovered and reused at near-zero cost.
“Malicious actors are increasingly using state-owned and commercially-available drone technology to threaten the personnel, infrastructure and assets of the US and our allies around the world,” a company spokesperson said.
“Anduril already provides a counter UAS family of systems to protect against such threats, and Roadrunner-M is our newest addition to that family. It is designed to address threats that extend across legacy air defence echelons, combating adversary attempts to design around gaps in current air defence architectures.”
The spokesperson said that, similar to traditional approaches to deter and defeat incoming aerial threats - like scrambling expensive and airfield-dependent jets, Roadrunner-M can take off, follow, and intercept distant targets at the first hint of danger, giving operators more information and time to assess the target and rules of engagement.
“If there is no need to destroy the target, Roadrunner-M can simply return to base and land at a pre-designated location for immediate refuelling and re-use. If the target does need to be destroyed, Roadrunner-M will swiftly do so. Unlike legacy missile systems, you can reuse all craft that are launched but not consumed,” the spokesperson added.
“This radical shift in thinking allows for large-scale defensive launches at extraordinarily low cost, increasing redundancy for higher probability of lethality and enhancing the ability to simultaneously engage many targets.”
Anduril claims Roadrunner-M's performance capacity is “far superior” to competing air defence solutions and it says it is already an overmatch capability against current and emerging threats.
“Its employment methodology significantly increases the operator’s engagement decision space which is critically constrained with current capabilities. Roadrunner-M innovations include faster launch and take-off timing, three times the warhead payload capacity, ten times the one-way effective range, and is three times more manoeuvrable in G force, compared to similar offerings on the market,” the spokesperson asserted.
“A single operator can launch and supervise multiple Roadrunner or Roadrunner-M squadrons. Roadrunner-M can be controlled by Lattice, Anduril’s AI-powered software suite for command and control, or be fully integrated into existing air defence radars, sensors, and architectures to provide immediately deployable capability.”