Anduril, the company founded by Oculus creator Palmer Luckey and one of the early buyers of the idea of virtual reality, has just announced explosive drones as its first weapons system.
“ALTIUS is incredibly versatile and can be used for missions such as remote ISR&T, kinetic engagement, RF decoy, SIGINT, comms relay, and RF/cyber warfare. Like all Anduril systems, the ALTIUS platform is autonomous and a single operator is able to control multiple assets.ALTIUS has demonstrated autonomous coordinated strike, target recognition and collaborative team.
The ALTIUS 600M and 700M are designed for expeditionary deployment by air, mobile, land or maritime forces, giving them a multi-domain launch capability. The airframe can be launched from any platform, including fixed-wing aircraft, high- and low-altitude rotary-wing aircraft, ground and utility vehicles, as well as watercraft,” Anduril explains.
In non-military English, this means that Anduril drones can hover over a location for a long time, in order to do reconnaissance, and then drop a war payload.
“It’s not the only weapon we’re developing, and it’s certainly not the last weapon we’ll be developing,” the company’s Chief Strategy Officer Chris Brose said in an interview with Breaking Defense.
According to The Verge, Palmer Luckey has also expressed interest in autonomous weapons like drones in the past.
His new company, like Peter Thiel’s Palantir, is named after an object appearing in The Lord of the Rings – in this case, the sword Aragorn uses to defeat the armies of Mordor.
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