Army to put together, test out, autonomous ISVs

The Army wants to see how well its Infantry Squad Vehicles handle without a driver after giving out contracts to three companies.

Forterra, Overland AI and Scout AI will pair their own self-driving solutions with Army ISVs and run through tests next May under three awards adding up to $15.5 million, an Army announcement revealed last week.

“We are looking forward to seeing how our industry partner’s autonomy solutions perform on vehicles while performing relevant military missions,” Col. Ken Bernier, project manager of the Future Battle Platforms project office, said in a statement. “We remain committed to bringing the best technologies to our warfighters and shaping the future of autonomous mobility for our Army at an unprecedented speed.”

The testing initiative, coined the “UxS Autonomous Maneuver Program,” will also involve a six-month stint with an Army unit under the service’s transforming in contact initiative, according to an Overland announcement for the award.

The program in total will run over a 16-month period and the Army could end up buying as much as $150 million worth of units, a Scout AI release says.

Overland uses an off-roading autonomy stack called OverDrive, which the Pentagon has already put to the test with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program.

Forterra will fit four ISVs with its own autonomy stack, called AutoDrive, the company announced in a press release yesterday, and Scout will integrate its autonomy stack, known as Fury, with the help of Textron Systems.

That comes after Army Secretary Dan Driscoll in recent months has touted the importance of harnessing commercial innovation to deliver soldiers capability fast, citing an example of how Silicon Valley company Applied Intuition in June morphed an ISV into a self-driving car in just 10 days.

“This award demonstrates the Army’s intent to leapfrog legacy automation systems and incorporate AI,” Colby Adcock, co-founder and CEO of Scout, said in a statement.