MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (April 3, 2024) — Ground warfare is fast, complex, and deadly. As the Department of Defense’s land warfare force, the U.S. Army must find ways to safely perform reconnaissance and related high-risk missions in these environments. Significant technological advances in robotics and self-driving vehicles are making it possible to use autonomous systems to support high-risk missions and reduce risk to combat forces during military operations.
The U.S. Army is partnering with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to prototype autonomy software and processes to adapt unmanned vehicle technology to a variety of diverse and challenging military environments. The Ground Vehicle Autonomous Path (GVAP) project will prototype software for unmanned vehicle navigation by integrating data from multiple sensors to enable remote operation of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs). Additionally, the project provides a technology pipeline to continue rapid modeling, testing, evaluation, development, and deployment of autonomy capabilities as they become commercially available.
“Over the past 20 years, the private sector has seen a revolution in unmanned ground vehicle technology and capabilities,” said Dr. Kevin O’Brien, technical director for DIU’s Autonomy Portfolio, “and we want to bring these mature technologies back to the Department of Defense, where our initial efforts were inspired by the DARPA Grand Challenge.”
DIU received 110 applications through two GVAP solicitations. In each solicitation, a panel of DoD experts facilitated a rigorous and competitive Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) selection process that selected four autonomous navigation vendors (Forterra, Kodiak Robotics, Neya Systems, and Overland AI), two machine learning and autonomy pipeline vendors (Applied Intuition Inc. and Scale AI), and two software systems integrators (Anduril Industries and Palantir Technologies). Together, these companies will support the Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) program in developing a robust, high-performance, and compliant software system that can operate in multiple autonomous modes and integrate with various payloads as they become available.
“We are pleased to collaborate with best-in-class autonomy providers, software experts and systems integrators as we advance efforts to integrate software capabilities developed through the RCV Software Acquisition Pathway (SWP) into the RCV Full System Prototype (FSP),” said Steve Herrick, RCV product manager. “Our software systems integrators will be the first to implement Traceability, Observability, Replaceability and Autonomy Consumption (TORC) compliance on the Army’s software-centric ground vehicles, helping ensure program flexibility and performance over the long term.”
Previously published on December 6, 2022 and May 6, 2023. The April 2024 edition contains updated award information and PM estimates.
