Autonomous Aerial Vehicles
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Anduril Industries has announced its acquisition of Blue Force Technologies, a developer of autonomous aircraft.
Blue Force Technologies designs and manufactures high-end composite aircraft and their components, with an integrated aerostructures division that serves a wide range of defense and commercial customers.
This transaction will expand Anduril’s existing autonomous fleet to include large, high performance, group 5 aircraft and will significantly increase the company’s reach and impact within the Department of Defense (DoD).
Blue Force has been developing Fury, a group 5 autonomous air vehicle 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.
Blue Force recently successfully completed a flight test of the flight software on board a Variable Stability In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft (VISTA) and a ground test for Fury’s novel carbon fiber composite propulsion flowpath system.
Anduril is investing in the development of the Fury autonomous air vehicle, expanding manufacturing operations accelerating development of technologies critical to future capabilities such as autonomous collaborative platforms.
These new capabilities are critical to maintaining deterrence in an era of strategic competition. 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.
The U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps have all signaled 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.
This acquisition follows Anduril’s successful launch of Lattice for Mission Autonomy earlier this year, the artificial intelligence-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 accelerate the development of autonomous operations. The company’s objective is to support Department of Defense and allied militaries services in fielding autonomous and artificially intelligent systems as fast as possible.
