I’ve been going to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) every January ever since I wasn’t allowed to, back when I was 16 years old with a specious ModRetro business card and little tech industry experience beyond my very first prototype of what would eventually become the Oculus Rift. While Anduril doesn’t make consumer electronics, I still attend every year to scout out new technology and meet with friends, partners, and suppliers who brave the Vegas crowds in search of tech esoterica.
Twelve years of watching drone technology at CES emerge and then boom has made one thing abundantly clear: China Won. American companies have built a lot of cool science fair projects that get lots of media attention, but minimal real-world deployment – from light shows to food delivery. We also design a lot of interesting low-volume consumer drones, but most of them lean heavily on Chinese R&D and then go on to have their product manufactured in China. Yes, I know, I am fully aware I did the same thing years ago with Oculus.
This situation would piss me off a lot less if China was only winning the sales game. As a PC gamer, I intimately understand that the cheaper option (consoles) sell very well given their ease of use and affordability. In the case of drones, though, China leads the global drone industry across the entire spectrum, not only in quantity, but in quality! DJI dominates the high end by building incredible imaging, networking, power, and aero systems while hundreds of Shenzhen-located companies nip at their heels by cranking out cheaper mid-range and low-end drones, along with most of the offerings designed by Western companies. DJI might get temporarily beaten here and there by some upstart focusing on a specific feature or specification, but when it comes to the overall package, they rarely even get close. When it comes to consumers, that overall package is what matters.
Sadly, this is also true for militaries around the world, including the United States and our allies. Given the amazing capabilities offered by the latest consumer drone technology, many units with any sort of purchasing authority discarded US-made drones that cost literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in favor of Chinese drones that cost just a few hundred dollars, driven by desire for compact size, great image quality, ease of use (especially during takeoff and landing) and the ability to hover in place rather than flying orbits (circles) around ever-changing views of their targets. The 2019-2020 National Defense Authorization Act banned most government entities from purchasing or using Chinese drones, which inspired quite a few well-meaning but half-hearted attempts by US drone startups to adapt hobbyist and consumer drone designs for military service. Designs that were optimized around the needs of consumers and hobbyists are rarely the right answer for brave users who spend a little more and demand a heck of a lot more, from security to durability to endurance and beyond. In other words, the men and women who serve on the front lines.
This is why we built Ghost. It is American-designed, American-made, and built from the ground up for the needs of warfighters, the most demanding users in the world. We threw out the template everyone has been using for a decade and started from first principles, using world-class design to make something extraordinary. We didn’t invent any new chemistry, metallurgy, or physics, we just used the same materials available to everyone in a very new way. Warfighters have already been using previous versions of Ghost for a while now, but we are finally able to talk more publicly about our work in this space as we launch Ghost 4.
I can’t possibly cover all of the elements of Ghost that make it the best drone there is (that a person can carry, anyway – Predators don’t count) because there are just too many things to cover. The best way to try is probably comparisons with a few elements of other drones people are familiar with:
- Ghost is a single-rotor aircraft. The mechanicals of the rotor system are harder to design and manufacture than a DJI-style quadcopter, and flight controls are harder to program, but the result is much lower aerodynamic disk loading that results in longer endurance (over 100 minutes with real mission payloads), near-silent acoustic signature, high max payload capacity (dozens of pounds), and high speed. Compare this with a DJI Inspire 2, a high-end offering that costs $3000 that can lumber around with a couple pounds for 24 to 27 minutes, props screaming. If we wanted to create the best marketing numbers, we could fly a drone with nothing on it for even longer, but that isn’t my style. Multicopters are better and easier for some applications, but not this.
- Ghost is autonomous, powered by an onboard AI Core that can perform 32 trillion operations per second. That is hundreds of times more than most drones this size, and we use it to power complex computer vision and sensor fusion algorithms that make Ghost into something less like a manually operated RC plane or blob-following quadcopter and more like a real pilot, capable of making decisions and acting on them with minimal human guidance. The operator can rely on Ghost to reliably perform all kinds of tasks for them, even when communications are jammed or turned off to avoid detection. It is hard to overstate how much software work is involved in this capability – the future of warfare will be superficially hardware-driven with a buttload of software smarts under the hood making it all actually work.
- Ghost is compact, not just for the capabilities provided, but in absolute terms. To make another comparison, Ghost packs up into a bag that is even smaller than the DJI Inspire carry case! This is important when you want to ship, carry, and deploy dozens of Ghosts from a single truck, or just carry a single unit with you into the field.
- Ghost is practically invisible to the targets it observes, with a frontal cross-section smaller than some of the phones I have owned over the years. Stay tuned for true invisibility.
- Ghost sees you no matter what, using stabilized visible spectrum imaging, thermal imaging, and other specialized sensors all fused into a single picture by our AI Core.
- Ghost is incredibly rugged, a mix of well-machined metals and carbon fiber composites with a direct-drive motor and minimal wear components. We weren’t trying to set flight endurance records – our top priority was to make something that could survive neglect, desert heat, arctic cold, high winds, heavy shock, abusive combat environments, and submersion in salt water. Most of our competition will get taken out by any one of those things, and we still manage to fly far longer.
- Ghost is modular and never obsolete, with payload rails on the top and bottom of the aircraft that provide access to power and data for new capabilities from both Anduril and third-parties, from electronic warfare to loudspeakers to satcom to laser designators. Unlike other drones that have a single accessory attachment point (or none), we accommodate five standard payload modules on the top and as many as space and weight allow on the bottom.
- Ghost doesn’t use a crazy power source (yet). Our battery packs are utilizing the same type of 21700 battery cells used by companies like Tesla and Samsung – not the most energy-dense cells out there, but we can (and have) changed our endurance using modular-rail mounted power supplies with more exotic battery chemistries, gasoline, and hydrogen fuel. We didn’t get great endurance with science fair project technology, we did it with the most stable, affordable, and logistically-sustainable tech out there, which was much harder. More to come on other power sources in the future.
- Ghost is designed from the start for swarming and teaming, allowing a single operator to control large numbers of mesh-networked airframes across vast distances, sometimes from the other side of the world. This is so much harder than locally controlling a single drone as a single operator, but the tactical rewards are obvious. This is only possible because of our previous work on Lattice, which allows us to fuse data from thousands of sources into a single AI-driven collaborative common operating picture. The work we have done with Ghost is going into our other unannounced drone projects as well.
- All those other things you imagine Ghost is going to do in the future, it is going to do.
It is hard to call any device “the best” without qualification. There will always be specific comparisons where a particular feature was prioritized at the expense of others, or arguments about semantics, definitions, and research lab demonstrations of immature technologies. In this case, though, I feel very comfortable saying that Ghost 4 is the best drone there is. I can’t wait to get the latest version into the skies with US warfighters and their allies across the globe – orders start right now, shipments start in Q1 2021. I owe a huge thank you to the partners who have helped us go from janky prototype to production, especially the Future Commando Force.
Oh, and I am really bummed that CES is not happening this year. I wanted to show up with a big booth for Ghost 4 in the middle of the drone section, with plenty of flags and a big banner proclaiming “THE BEST DRONES ARE AMERICAN DRONES”. Maybe Ghost 5?