WASHINGTON — Aircraft startup Hermeus’s Mk 2 Quarterhorse high-speed drone will be equipped with autonomy software provided by defense tech firm Anduril, the two companies exclusively told Breaking Defense.
Under the new teaming arrangement, Anduril’s mission autonomy suite, Lattice, will be paired with the Quarterhorse for flight testing that will kickoff next year. The Quarterhorse is being developed with funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, with a goal to fly the aircraft at speeds as fast as Mach 3.
“As we evaluated a bunch of solutions, we viewed Anduril as the natural partner,” Hermeus CEO Zach Shore said in an interview ahead of the announcement.
Hermeus is developing the Quarterhorse iteratively through a series of flight tests, which to this point have been remotely controlled. “We now need to automate a lot of those flight controls,” Shore explained. “I want to be able to push a button, have the aircraft spin up, have the aircraft auto takeoff, all those basic features that allow one person to manage multiple platforms. Irrespective of the mission, just that level of command-and-control and scalability, we needed a partner to help us do that.”
Brett Darcey, Anduril’s general manager and vice president for mission autonomy in air dominance and strike, told Breaking Defense that Anduril will provide an “end-to-end” solution for autonomous operations, from the software needed for flying to the ground control systems used by operators.
