Anduril unveils Roadrunner and Roadrunner-M

California company Anduril Industries has unveiled its Roadrunner and Roadrunner-M Autonomous Air Vehicles (AAV). Roadrunner is a Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) AAV designed to be customized for various missions; Roadrunner-M is a radical new class of recoverable ground-based air defence missiles.

Roadrunner is a modular, twin-jet powered autonomous air vehicle with very high performance at what the company says is low cost. Its VTOL capability gives Roadrunner the flexibility to rapidly launch from and return to any location, pairing high subsonic speed with exceptional agility and stability.

The modular payload system can carry a variety of payloads to accomplish broad sets of missions and can be constantly updated, the company says.

Roadrunner-M is a high-explosive interceptor variant of Roadrunner for ground-based air defence that can rapidly identify, intercept and destroy an array of manned and unmanned aerial threats that are up to 100 times more expensive. It can also be recovered and reused at near-zero cost.

Anduril already provides a counter UAS family of systems and Roadrunner-M was designed to address threats that extend across legacy air defence echelons, combating adversary attempts to design around gaps in current air defence architectures.

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 refueling and reuse. If the target does need to be destroyed, Roadrunner-M is designed to hit it and then explode.

Unlike legacy missile systems, you can reuse all craft that are launched but not consumed. This radical shift in thinking allows for large-scale defensive launches at extraordinarily low cost, the company believes, increasing redundancy for higher probability of lethality and enhancing the ability to simultaneously engage many targets.

Roadrunner-M’s performance capacity is far superior to competing air defense solutions, the company says, and 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. 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 it can be fully integrated into existing air defence radars, sensors, and architectures to provide immediately deployable capability.