Lasers and partnering with Rheinmetall…so hot right now.
Directed energy startup Aurelius Systems is teaming up with the German mega-prime’s American subsidiary to integrate its drone-downing laser weapon, Archimedes, onto a Rheinmetall unmanned ground vehicle, the company exclusively told Tectonic.
The partnership is the first for Aurelius and, since they aren’t planning to make ground robots and Rheinmetall isn’t making lasers (at least like the ones Aurelius is), it’s a “very natural partnership for us, and a very high volume one—one we can grow with,” CEO Michael LaFramboise told Tectonic. “It’s very helpful, especially to extend range and effectiveness.”
Laser love: Aurelius, to back things up, is carving a nice little niche for itself in the laser weapon world, which, if you’ve been following the Pentagon’s social media pages, is getting a lot of love right now. It’s also getting a bunch of cash: The White House’s FY2027 budget outlined more than $2B for the development of directed-energy tech.
- Aurelius raised a $10M seed round led by VC heavyweights General Catalyst and Draper Associates last September.
- The company’s flagship weapon, called Archimedes, is designed to shoot down hostile Group 1 (and, according to the company, Group 2) drones using a high-power directed energy laser.
- It’s designed to be fully autonomous (a core difference from AV’s semi-autonomous LOCUST laser), using Aurelius’ in-house sensing and autonomous engagement to track and zap drones. That autonomy can be scaled back to keep a human operator in the loop—primarily at the point of “actually hitting the fire button or not,” LaFramboise said—but “in terms of aiming and targeting, we really want to have heavy reliance on AI.”
- It comes in a vehicle-friendly, compact form factor and is built to draw power from a grid, generator, or battery. “We ship with an onboard battery…but you can essentially just trickle-charge constantly” using a vehicle’s alternator, he added. Seems handy.
Archimedes is also, from the sounds of it, pretty effective: At the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering’s (OUSW R&E) recent T-REX 26-2 exercise, the laser successfully downed over 20 quadcopter drones, “as well as more than five Army-supplied drones that the platform had not encountered before.”
- The Aurelius team was also on the ground at the Army’s Operation Jailbreak at Fort Carson, where they integrated Archimedes and their C2 software with Anduril’s Lattice and the Army’s legacy Forward Area Air Defense (FAAD) C2 system, which they “executed in about 48 hours,” LaFramboise said.
Zap on the go: To start, Archimedes will be integrated onto American Rheinmetall’s Ox UGV, the company’s bid for the US Army’s Ground Optionally Autonomous Transport (GOAT) vehicle program, designed to transport supplies and equipment over rugged terrain. Rheinmetall is one of two companies competing for that program, and it looks like they’re betting that adding in some laser-flavored air defense courtesy of Aurelius could help give them an edge.
Now, this isn’t the first time drone-downing lasers have been put on vehicles. Last year, AV delivered two LOCUSTs integrated onto Infantry Squad Vehicles and two mounted on Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTVs under the Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) prototyping program.
Aurelius’ pitch is that they can make ‘em cheaper and with commercially available components, making the platform field-repairable, mass-producible, and more tactical, LaFramboise said. “We’re focused on being the Ford Motor Company in the space, making F-150s, and tens of thousands of them.”
Teaming up with one of the hottest military vehicle manufacturers in the game should help with that.