Mission Brief

• Founded: 2017
• Headquarters: Costa Mesa, CA
• Mission: Build and deploy autonomous systems that give U.S. and allied forces a decisive advantage.
• Operational Focus: High-tempo test & evaluation, rapid autonomy iteration, and safe scale-up from prototypes to production fleets.

The Challenge: When Testing Outpaces Analysis Infrastructure

Anduril operates on a clear premise: test volume drives capability. More tests means more learning. More learning means faster iteration. This philosophy extends across all domains: air, land, sea, and space.

But test volume creates a constraint: analysis infrastructure. The ability to manage and process test data is a limiting factor at-scale.

High-tempo testing across Anduril’s vehicle programs produces massive data volumes: high-frequency telemetry at 1-10 kHz across thousands of channels, onboard video from multiple cameras, logs capturing autonomy decisions, and operator annotations tracking failures and configurations.

Before Nominal, this data landed in dozens of different storage systems and analysis tools spanning test sites and customer operations worldwide. Each program and team had evolved their own stack for operationalizing test data. Sharing insight required manual exports, screenshots over Slack, or learning another team’s bespoke analysis workflow. Test tempo accelerated but the ability to run analysis did not.

The Solution: One Platform for All Programs

Anduril adopted Nominal as the analysis platform underpinning its test and evaluation workflows across a number of Anduril programs, a unified solution where every signal from multiple products could be captured, synchronized, and understood.

One Data Catalog

Nominal Core ingests multimodal data from every source, automatically collates and aligns it, and makes it rapidly queryable by engineers and operators of all stripes.

A test engineer at headquarters, mission operator at a remote range, and software lead at a development facility all work from the same organized catalog of Runs and Assets.

Specialists Build Templates, Teams Run Analysis

Flight test engineers build Workbook templates for post-flight analysis: motor performance, battery discharge, control loop stability, perception accuracy. Specialists define the logic once (which derivatives, which comparisons, which metrics) and save it as a template that any engineer or operator can utilize.

Analysis that required custom Python scripting for each flight (multiple hours, specialist-only) now takes any user minutes. Specialists shifted from repetitive work to investigating anomalies and developing new methodologies.

The transformation: A bottleneck once limited to a few specialists became a capability shared across entire engineering teams.

Real-Time Intelligence in Disconnected Environments

Anduril must perform operations in austere test ranges with limited connectivity and within classified environments that have no egress to the cloud. Nominal Core deploys to servers at the edge, processing high-rate data locally with sub-250ms latency. Real-time monitoring, automated anomaly detection, and electronic procedures execute live during tests. When connectivity returns, data flows back into centralized storage without manual handling, enabling mission operators at austere ranges to have the same capabilities as engineers at headquarters.

Scaling Across Vehicle Classes

As Anduril has scaled their product lines, Nominal has scaled with them. What started as a fast way to review flight logs for small UAVs became the shared workspace for engineers analyzing mission data across all domains.

• Test data flows from the field into Anduril's data lake and is immediately available in Nominal for analysis. Anduril and Nominal engineers jointly partnered on data ETL pathways that were 40x faster than existing vendor systems.
• Discipline engineers generate charts in seconds with Workbooks and share data with a simple browser link. Version control is handled inside Nominal, preventing fragmentation of analysis scripts as users share artifacts and iterate.
• Web-based analysis largely eliminates the need to pull data locally. What once required hours of exporting and processing across multiple storage systems is now available instantly.

The same infrastructure supports different sensors and different operational contexts. A control systems insight from an aerial vehicle informs maritime autonomy development. A perception algorithm tested on ground platforms transfers to flight. Cross-domain learning becomes standard practice.

Results

• Faster test loops: From 5-6 hours to near real-time analysis
• 40× faster telemetry ingest than vendor provided ETL solutions
• Adoption at scale: 300+ active users across multiple programs
• Operational continuity: Full-function air-gapped deployments with automated backhaul for headquarters analysis, preserving full visibility throughout the mission cycle
• Mindset shift: Non-developers can self-service their test data workflows; analysts can collaborate across programs in one shared environment

The Work Continues

The mission is urgent. Threats don't wait for perfect tools. Anduril tests aggressively, learns quickly, and ships capability at a pace that the moment demands.

Instrument everything. Understand quickly. Iterate relentlessly.

Those are the operating principles Anduril and Nominal share. High velocity testing delivers decisive advantage.