Robotics specialist Anduril Industries unveiled two new vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) on 1 December 2023 called the Roadrunner and Roadrunner-Munition (Roadrunner-M).
The Roadrunner is a modular, twin-jet-powered autonomous air vehicle that Anduril claims offers “extraordinary performance at low cost … pairing high subsonic speed with exceptional agility and stability”. Its VTOL capability gives it the flexibility to rapidly launch from and return to any location, while a modular payload system allows a variety of payloads to be carried to accomplish broad sets of missions.
The Roadrunner-M is a high-explosive interceptor variant of the Roadrunner for ground-based air defence. It can rapidly identify, intercept and destroy an array of aerial threats are up to 100 times more expensive than the vehicle itself, or 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 United States and our allies around the world. Anduril already provides a counter UAS family of systems to protect against such threats, and Roadrunner-M is our newest addition to that family,” the company stated in a press release. “Roadrunner-M was designed to address threats that extend across legacy air defense echelons, combating adversary attempts to design around gaps in current air defense architectures.”
The fact that unexpended Roadrunner-Ms can be recovered “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 asserted, claiming that its performance “is far superior than competing air defense solutions and is already an overmatch capability against current and emerging threats”.
Anduril says the Roadrunner-M offers “faster launch and take-off timing, three times the warhead payload capacity, 10 times the one-way effective range, and is three times more manoeuvrable in g force, compared to similar offerings on the market”.
A single operator can launch and supervise multiple Roadrunner or Roadrunner-M squadrons, with the air vehicles either controlled by Lattice – Anduril’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software suite for command and control – or fully integrated into existing air defence networks to provide an immediately deployable capability.
Noting that the Roadrunner system is market ready, Anduril said the system “went from a napkin sketch to an operationally validated and fieldable solution in less than two years, which is much faster than most traditional defence contractor timelines”, with the company funding its own research and development “to outpace competitors and deliver operationally ready capabilities within a fraction of usual timeframes”.
