land battle
A robotic combat vehicle light prototype used during soldier experiments at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California in 2023 (Savannah Baldwin/U.S. Army)
Washington – The Army has not announced which companies will manufacture the Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV), but it has currently selected eight companies. Prototype autonomous software and processes To power the fleet of the future and fight on the battlefield.
“We are excited to collaborate with best-in-class autonomy providers, software experts, and system integrators to integrate software capabilities developed through the RCV Software Acquisition Pathway (SWP) into RCV full system prototypes.” said RCV Product Manager Steve. Herrick said in a press release today.
Herrick's Army team is collaborating with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) on the Ground Vehicle Autonomous Pathway (GVAP) project, and after posting two requests and receiving 110 responses, the pair decided to enter the vendor field. and grouped them into three areas. Navigation, Machine Learning and Autonomy, Software Systems Integrators.
Four companies (Forterra, Kodiak Robotics, Neya Systems, Overland AI) have signed contracts for autonomous navigation pipelines, two companies (Applied Intuition and Scale AI) have partnered on machine learning and autonomy, and two more ( Anduril and Scale AI) are planning to partner. Palantir) competes to become a software systems integrator.
“These companies are working together to develop robust, capable, and compliant software systems that can operate in different autonomous modes and quickly integrate different payloads as they become available… (RCV) program. ”, the DIU added.
Additional details regarding the contract value, further evaluation process, and final downselection schedule were not disclosed today.
The service has been looking at how to operate autonomous combat vehicles for decades and has also embarked on a plan to acquire three categories: RCV-Light, -Medium, and -Heavy. However, after trying light and medium-sized prototypes, changed plans and decided We will focus first on the development of small vehicles and separate the hardware part (combat vehicle) from the software/autonomy part.
“you have [software defined] The technology cycle, or refresh cycle, far outpaces our purchasing model. …We have to find new ways to achieve a subset of that functionality in different ways. ” Undersecretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo said this today at the Association of the U.S. Army breakfast.
The service does just that with the RCV software portion, which is why we have discontinued all three size categories, at least for now. Maj. Gen. Glen Dean, the military's ground combat systems program executive director, told Breaking Defense in December 2023 that while the ongoing RCV work still has the word “light” attached to it, It was only in name, and the military said it “needs to be submitted.” Turn it off. ”
“In fact, from a capability standpoint, there is no light,” he said at the time. “This is an RCV with a mission payload, and the original kind of light, medium, heavy concept is now about modular mission payloads and…the mission role has changed to define the payload.”
For the actual vehicle portion of the competition, see Breaking Defense previously reported RCVs must be smaller than 224 x 88 x 94 inches, weigh less than 10 tons, and be transportable by rotary-wing aircraft. A single platform must also be able to defeat light to medium armored threats and include lethal capabilities such as self-defense systems, anti-tank guided missiles, and recoilless weapons.
4 companies They are currently vying to build such vehicles for the Army – McQ, Textron Systems; General dynamics land system and Oshkosh Defense — after the Army awarded them a total of $24.7 million last year for the first phase of the project. They are each tasked with delivering two RCVs to service by August for maneuverability testing and Soldier touchpoints. Findings from these events will be used to select a single company to proceed with Phase II in FY2025, with the winner completing the design and delivering up to nine prototypes by FY26. The Army announced last year that he would take on the mission.
