• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Anduril Fury

Fury is a high-performance, multi-mission group 5 autonomous air vehicle (AAV) enabling trusted and collaborative autonomy for the high-end fight. Leveraging Lattice software, Fury is designed to accelerate the development, testing, and fielding of Mission Autonomy into operational reality for the warfighter, delivering an unfair advantage for unrivaled deterrence. Fury leverages advanced rapid prototyping, digital engineering, and an open and modular system design to accelerate the speed from prototyping to production. An advanced software platform enabling a single human to control and coordinate a wide range of autonomous assets across the ocean, land, and sky to deliver successful mission outcomes.

Anduril, started by Palmer Luckey in 2017, is a defense technology company focusing on developing military software for the US and its allies. The Lord of the Rings Anduril sword is from the popular trilogy written by J.R.R.Tolkien. “The Sword of Elendil was forged anew by Elvish smiths, and on its blade was traced a device of seven stars set between the crescent Moon and rayed Sun, and about them was written many runes; for Aragorn son of Arathorn was going to war upon the marches of Mordor. Very bright was that sword when it was made whole again; the light of the sun shone redly in it, and the light of the moon shone cold, its edge was hard and keen. And Aragorn gave it a new name and called it Andúril, Flame of the West.”

Lattice's primary product is an open operating system meant to deliver autonomy to the most difficult defensive operations. It allows military members to operate with speed, confidence, and security across tactical and strategic operations, transforming data into information and allowing for more precise decision-making. The Fury High-Performance, Multi-Mission Platform is designed to deliver next-generation flight performance with the flexibility to integrate a variety of first or third-party sensors and payloads to support the mission requirements. The Model-Driven, Field-Tested digital design is rapidly tested, validated, and iterated by leveraging synthetic pilots and intelligent flight simulation onboard actual aircraft. Affordable Mass results from commercial off the shelf subsystems and all digital workflow from concept through manufacture, validation, and verification provides rapid and scalable production at a fraction of the cost of a crewed fighter.

Anduril integrates Fury with Lattice for Mission Autonomy software to deliver the holistic set of functions and behaviors required to field autonomous and collaborative air capabilities, such as manned-unmanned teaming. Lattice for Mission Autonomy makes it possible to compose different platforms and payloads, made by different vendors, into different mission solutions for different mission requirements. Lattice automatically breaks down operator intent into discrete tasks that are distributed across unmanned systems to best accomplish missions under human supervision. Onboard AI/ML algorithms autonomously process and fuse raw sensor data from distributed assets to detect, track, and target in real-time. Latticer provides automated management of onboard sensors and weapon systems to execute missions, and dynamically react to real-time inputs throughout mission execution to effectively operate in highly contested environments.

Defense technology company Anduril Industries announced 07 September 2023 its acquisition of Blue Force Technologies [BFT], a developer of autonomous aircraft with an integrated aerostructures division serving a wide range of defense and commercial customers. This transaction 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 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. 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 fiber composite propulsion flowpath system.

Today’s aerospace industry struggles to rapidly design, experiment, and field novel aerospace and defense capabilities because of the “lock in” business practices of major prime contractors. The rise of computational tools has not shortened design and build timelines over the last 50 years because their use has been offset by a “hard tooling” mindset investing in overly durable and complex tooling for 30-year production runs and 10,000 hour plus airframe life. Nearly all aircraft are expected to have multiple service life extensions due to the enormous non-recurring and recurring cost.

Blue Force developed a digital rapid development workflow to attack this constraint for commercial aerospace customers for attritable-class aircraft, defined as under $10 million per copy in production. BFT commercialized this offering and have proven the ability to transition from concept to flight test in one year followed by direct transition to low rate production. BFT applied this process to the development of capability for the ongoing Adversary Air (ADAIR) problem.

USAF will spend $6B on contractor Adversary Air (ADAIR) in the next 10 years, and likely an equivalent amount on self-generated ADAIR for F-22 and F-35, which currently have no viable Red counterpart. By 2030, the total number USAF ADAIR sorties fall between 65,000 (minimum) and 150,000 (desired), which will overwhelm the enterprise, irrespective of cost. Estimates are that 60% of these sorties are for Beyond Visual Range (BVR) training, which is easily automated, given a suitable low-cost, high-performance vehicle. Blue Force Technologies (BFT) proposes to develop a small, purpose-built unmanned ADAIR (U-ADAIR) vehicle using BFT custom airframe capability with commercial components, resulting in a vehicle that can emulate a modern 5th gen threat yet costs 10-30% of what USAF spends per hour on contractor 3rd gen ADAIR.

The solution provides 5th generation LO aircraft, representative IRST signature, BFT use existing commercial technology integrated into a modular airframe and integrate state of the art electronics systems. In this effort BFT adapt and extend the approach to attritable-class aircraft. The focus is on novel use of materials – often overlooked or long ago ruled out due to anticipated lifetimes – coupled with a minimal tooling approach. The approach directly addresses the need to reconsider manufacturing techniques and materials in the context of the requirements associated with attritable-class aircraft – low cost, high performance, and the ability to manufacture quickly while trading away long lifetime airframes.

In collaboration with Air Combat Command (ACC) and AFRL/RQ the concept was advanced through preliminary design review and an Iron-Bird was developed to demonstrate the semi-autonomous flight capabilities as well as the Guidance-Navigation-Control system. Analysis and design tasks have been completed under the previous contracts that have validated that this technology capability provides the ability to save the USAF hundreds of millions of dollars annually while also enabling the USAF to achieve their need for 100,000 sorties per year of threat relevant presentations.

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 nontraditional company that uses its own capital for research and development, Anduril moves fast to engineer, prototype, develop and produce new capabilities for the Department of Defense.

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 further accelerate the development of autonomous operations like manned-unmanned teaming and other critical advanced autonomous solutions for warfighters around the world.

Anduril is a proven leader in developing and fielding integrated autonomous solutions across a wide variety of sensors, effectors and assets across domains. Anduril has experience automating the operations of hundreds of robotic systems deployed in tactical environments around the world. Its objective is to support Department of Defense and allied militaries services in fielding autonomous and artificially intelligent systems as fast as possible.

The United States Air Force announced 24 April 2024 that Anduril has been selected as one of two vendors to move forward on the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. Over the next phase, Anduril will design, manufacture, and test production-representative CCAs. “There is no time to waste on business as usual. With the CCA program, Secretary Kendall and the Air Force have embraced a fast-moving, forward-looking approach to field autonomous systems at speed and scale,” said Brian Schimpf, CEO and Co-Founder. “We are honored to be selected for this unprecedented opportunity, which signals a demand for continued expansion of the defense industrial base. Anduril is proud to pave the way for other non-traditional defense companies to compete and deliver on large scale programs.”

“Anduril’s work on this program is just beginning,” said Jason Levin, Senior Vice President of Anduril’s Air Dominance & Strike Division. “U.S. and allied success in the future requires CCAs to be delivered at a speed, cost, and scale to beat the pacing threat. We look forward to continuing our partnership with the U.S. Air Force to deliver this critical capability to our Airmen as quickly as possible.”

Autonomy and affordable mass have been central tenets of Anduril’s approach since the company’s founding in 2017. Anduril is committed to transforming US and allied defense capabilities by combining modern software expertise with a rapid and differentiated approach to hardware development and manufacturing. From cutting-edge counter drone systems to extra-large autonomous underwater vehicles, Anduril has proven it can deliver highly-performant, next-generation, software-defined capabilities on a timeline and scale that matters.