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Anduril calls itself an AI product company. It states that it is dedicated to solving national security challenges, such as protecting troops, fighting wildfires, performing search & rescue missions and conducting border surveillance. The company was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, who previously invented Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) headsets. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel provided support.
Anduril’s system consists of towers, called Sentry Towers, with radar, communications antennae, and a laser-enhanced cameras, which can detect motions within a 2-mile radius. It works in conjunction with the company's software called Lattice AI. There is also a drone product called Ghost UAS, which is an autonomous drone that can be used for mapping new territory. Testing Lattice in Texas has been reported by US Customs and Border Protection to catch fifty-five unauthorized border crossers in a ten-week period.
The company's product can be considered “virtual border wall” technology for surveillance at the US-Mexico border, which merges VR with surveillance tools to create a digital wall of “all-seeing eyes, with intelligence to know what it sees.” Wearing the VR headset allows a person to see a digital world that simulates the view of the real world but highlights moving objects that are a mile away and gives the user the likelihood that what they are seeing is a person and an animal.
In 2019, Anduril received a US Marine Corps contract of $13.5 million to cover “autonomous surveillance counter-intrusion capabilities” at Marine Corps bases in Japan, Hawaii and in Yuma, Arizona near the US-Mexico border. Anduril’s Lattice platform is theoretically able to detect human figures using AI. Lattice sentry towers are equipped with arrays of sensors. Anduril also supplies drones to support the Lattice program, which the Marine Corps tested in 2018.
Anduril has been reported to be working on the Pentagon’s controversial Project Maven drone program. Anduril is partnering with the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom to launch autonomous mine-hunting ships.
Jamie Hyneman of Mythbusters and creator of a robot called Blendo on Robot Wars was hired as a contractor with Anduril to build a remote piloted tank to put out wildfires. There are exterior water sprayers. To prevent electromechanical problems due to heat, a coolant composed of 50/50 glycerin and water sprays continuously over the entire interior. The coolant absorbs the heat and is passed off to the thousand gallons of water in the tanks. The tank is designed to be able to rescue and take passengers.
Lattice OS is an open operating system designed to work with Anduril's systems to offer a single operating system to control those devices. This includes using autonomous systems to create a real-time understanding of the battlespace, which can be shared among users. This uses technologies like sensor fusion, computer vision, edge computing, and machine learning to detect, track, and classify object of interest in an operator's vicinity.
Further, the platform is open and extensible in order to integrate third-party, legacy, and autonomous systems to work in a single command and control missions. Lattice OS is further able to be integrated and deployed to build a secure mesh network in remote and contested areas. This can allow users to remove a single point of failure, which is associated with traditional hub-and-spoke models. Lattice is capable of autonomous categorization, evaluation, and prioritization for the best path for the flow of information.
