Anduril announces Pulsar family of AI-Enabled EW systems

California-based defence contractor Anduril Industries has announced Pulsar, an agile software-defined EW system that can swiftly adapt to changing threats and mission needs in all domains. Although it is believed to have been in service for some time, the system’s appearance at SOF Week in Tampa, Florida, was the first public disclosure of Pulsar.

Anduril Industries describes Pulsar as a first-of-its-kind family of modular, multi-mission-capable Electromagnetic Warfare (EW) systems using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to rapidly identify and defeat current and future threats across the electromagnetic spectrum, including small and medium-size drones.

Dominance of the electromagnetic spectrum is critical to operations on a modern battlefield of rapidly-evolving drone, counter-drone, and jamming technologies, the company acknowledges. As the war in Ukraine has shown, EW tactics are evolving faster than ever with updates to EW and threat systems now happening over shorter timelines of weeks, days, or even hours.

The next generation of EW systems must enable real-time understanding of the spectrum, and provide rapid delivery of effective countermeasures against known and new threats, across domains and modalities, says Anduril Industries.

Pulsar integrates a software-defined radio, graphics processing unit, and other processors into a compact and powerful capability that enables Radio Frequency Machine Learning (RFML) to rapidly identify and adapt to emerging threats at the edge.

The system is a multi-mission EW solution, the company says, capable of electronic countermeasures, counter-unmanned systems, electronic support, electronic attack, direction finding, geolocation, and other advanced EW capabilities. Pulsar’s modular form factor can also be adapted and integrated onto ground vehicles (Pulsar-V) or aircraft (Pulsar-A) to support distributed EW operations across multiple domains.

Pulsar provides the capability to intelligently and autonomously interrogate a wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum, both for known threats and anomalous events, while reducing the time to deploy new EW effects to a matter of hours and days, says Anduril Industries.

Pulsar’s open architecture enables integrations into common and joint EW and command-and-control systems to create a unified network of EW capabilities, providing more comprehensive coverage and coordinated effects across distributed operations. It also provides a software development kit that enables continuous development and integrations with third-party providers and rapid integration of best-of-breed capabilities in order to keep pace with new threats and missions.