Anduril Industries acquires UAS developer Blue Force Technologies

US defence technology company Anduril Industries has acquired Blue Force Technologies, a North Carolina-based developer of Autonomous Air Vehicle (AAVs) with an integrated aerostructures division serving a wide range of defence and commercial customers. This purchase will expand Anduril’s existing autonomous fleet to now include large high-performance, group 5 aircraft and significantly increases Anduril’s reach and impact within the Department of Defense. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Blue Force Technologies designs and manufactures high-end composite aircraft and their components at its factories in North Carolina. Blue Force Technologies has been developing Fury, a Group 5 AAV with fighter-like performance, since 2019. Fury leverages proprietary rapid prototyping, digital engineering and an open architecture that is designed to deliver next-generation flight performance with the flexibility to integrate heterogenous sensors and payloads to support air dominance missions.

Recently, the company successfully completed a flight test of the flight software on board a VISTA, Variable Stability In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft, and a ground test for Fury’s novel carbon fibre composite propulsion flowpath system.

Anduril is making significant investments to continue the development of the Fury autonomous air vehicle, expand manufacturing operations in North Carolina and accelerate development of technologies critical to future capabilities such as autonomous collaborative platforms. As a non-traditional company that uses its own capital for research and development, Anduril moves fast to engineer, prototype, develop and produce new capabilities for the US Department of Defense (DoD) and other international customers, including the Australian Department of Defence.

To project force, deter aggression, and regain affordable mass, the DoD will need to rely on large quantities of smaller, lower-cost, more autonomous systems, says Anduril Industries. The US Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps have all signalled their intention to modernize and adopt advanced autonomous capabilities. This ecosystem of autonomous systems must be powered by software that enables a single operator to control multiple assets to accomplish a wide range of missions, the company believes.

The acquisition of Blue Force Technologies follows Anduril’s successful launch of Lattice for Mission Autonomy earlier this year, the AI-enabled software platform that enables teams of autonomous systems to dynamically collaborate to achieve complex missions, under human supervision. By investing in both hardware and software capabilities, Anduril will further accelerate the development of autonomous operations like manned-unmanned teaming and other critical advanced autonomous solutions for warfighters around the world.