Anduril has invented a new drone flying competition where jobs are the prize

Palmer Luckey’s eyes light up, and he speaks a mile a minute, when discussing his company’s new hiring event: Amnesty International Grand Prize.

This is a drone flying competition with a twist. Instead of humans operating drones, drones must operate autonomously. Humans will be tested on their skills in writing software that makes drones outperform their competitors.

There are prizes ranging from a $500,000 pool distributed among the highest-scoring teams, to jobs at Anduril, and the chance to bypass the company’s standard hiring cycle.

“It was something I decided we had to do,” Lucki, the founder of Anduril, said in an interview with TechCrunch. He remembers Loki and the team meeting to discuss recruitment strategy.

Someone suggested sponsoring a drone racing tournament, which is somewhat in line with the company’s previous marketing tactics. For example, Anduril sponsors the popular NASCAR Cup Series race 250 on the sensor.

Loki generally liked the idea but then said, “Guys, this would be a really stupid thing for Anduril to sponsor. The whole point, our whole momentum and the reason we exist, is that autonomy has finally advanced to where you don’t have to have someone micromanaging every drone,” and then added, “What we should really be doing is sponsoring a race around how well programmers and engineers can make a drone fly itself.”

After discovering that no such event existed, the company chose to create it itself. However, interestingly, Lucki noted that the teams participating in the AI ​​Grand Prix will not be using Anduril drones, but rather those made by another defense technology startup: Neuros Technologies. According to Luckey, the Anduril drones are too large to run on the current track in Ohio where the finals will be held.

“We’ve talked about teams using Anduril drones, but Anduril doesn’t make any drones of the very high-speed, very small nature that you want in a drone racing league. It’s mostly bigger stuff,” he said.

Anduril is also partnering with an established racing league, the Drone Champions League, to run the event, as well as JobsOhio. The final race will be held in Ohio (where Anduril’s main manufacturing facility falls).

Although Loki is clearly excited about how fun the event is, he won’t be a racer himself. “I’ll definitely be there, but it’s going to be about who can build the best software to fly these drones,” he says.

He smiled and said, “I’m actually not a good software programmer. I’m a hardware specialist. I’m an electromechanical and optics specialist, and I know enough about programming to glue things together in a way that suits my prototypes.”

(Lockey calls Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf “our de facto lead software mind” at the company.)

He said the founder hopes to have at least 50 teams, and already has interest from multiple universities. If this competition is successful, the plan is to expand it to include races with other types of autonomous vehicles.

“We started with these racing drones, which is what people expect from drone racing. However, we want to apply racing AI in the future to other platforms as well,” he said.

Underwater AI races, land AI races, and perhaps even spacecraft AI races were among the ideas Loki shared.

The competition is open to all international teams except teams from Russia.

“The difference with Russia is that they are actively engaged in the process of invading Europe,” he said.

The concern is that people who qualify to enter such a race may also serve in the military in their country. “I would love to have everyone, but we are not the Olympics,” he added.

Luque said the event follows in the footsteps of the World Cup, which also excluded Russia.

Interestingly, teams from China (home of a lot of indie engineering) are welcome, despite that being the country you live in American Independent Arms Hawks They are often called their greatest fear.

If a Chinese team wins, the prize for working at Anduril, which makes weapons used by the US military, will not be a given. “If you work for the Chinese military, you won’t be allowed to get a job in Anduril,” Loki said. He pointed out that there are certain laws that apply. In fact, there will still be some interviews and qualification processes for all job candidates.

The competition will take place across three qualifying rounds starting in April, with the final Grand Prix scheduled to take place in November.