What if a missile could jet toward a moving target — and then fly back home to try again if it missed?
That’s the idea behind the Roadrunner, a novel combination of AI-powered drone, bomb and boomerang designed by the defense tech company Anduril Industries and announced on Thursday.
The company unveiled the product at its Costa Mesa headquarters to a scrum of journalists, showing videos of what the new machine can do. In one sequence, the Roadrunner takes off vertically from a rocky hillside and then flies out to hit a Reaper-style drone in midair. The Roadrunner itself is destroyed on impact, effectively serving as a guided missile. In another sequence, the Roadrunner takes off, flies around and then returns to its launching point, where it lands nose-up on a series of pop-out landing struts, much like one of SpaceX’s reusable rockets.
Christian Brose, Anduril’s chief strategy officer, said the product was designed to provide the U.S. military and its allies with a way to destroy hostile airborne threats, from small drones up to cruise missiles and manned aircraft, while keeping costs down.
“A few years ago, what we saw coming,” Brose said, “was a new class of threats”: exploding drones that can be launched en masse, which blur the lines between cruise missiles and traditional drones, and cost only tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to launch.
“There just wasn’t a reliable capability available to bring these…
