Overland AI just keeps notching wins.
Yesterday—hot off winning the Army’s xTechOverwatch competition—the ground autonomy startup announced that it’s won a $2M Army contract to “put autonomous ground vehicles in the hands of 1st Cavalry Division Troopers.”
Thought the whole idea was that hands weren’t necessary, but who are we to say?
Rise of the robots: Overland has become a pretty major player in the UGV space in the last couple of years.
The company was founded in 2022 as a spin-out from the University of Washington and co-founder and CEO Byron Boots’ work on a DARPA ground robotics program. Since then, they’ve rolled out a whole suite of ground autonomy products, including:
- ULTRA: A fully autonomous tactical UGV that can carry a range of payloads (last fall, they teamed up with Anduril to stick on some sensors and cUAS).
- OverDrive: The autonomy brain behind the “look ma, no hands” vehicles. The stack perceives and maps terrain with active and passive on-board sensors without relying on GPS or pre-mapped routes.
- OverWatch: A command-and-control interface designed to let operators coordinate fleets of autonomous ground systems, plan optimized routes, re-task vehicles to counter threats, and deploy payloads.
- SPARK: An autonomy “upfit kit” that runs through OverDrive and can turn pretty much any ground vehicle into a drone.
The startup scored an $18.6M contract with DIU and the Army for the Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) program in 2024 (that’s what produced ULTRA), and says it works with the Army, Marine Corps, and Special Operations Command.
They’ve also inked some pretty impressive partnerships, including with Anduril and AimLock.
Stiff competition: According to Overland, ULTRA was selected as one of 20 winners at the xTechOverwatch competition by “successfully [demonstrating] autonomous route clearance and overwatch throughout the event,” and managing to autonomously “deploy a tethered UAS for ISR and smoke from the UGV for obscuration.”
And the company seems pretty pumped about both the win and the contract.
“We were born from competition and thrive under pressure,” they wrote in a post. “We know there is no substitute for getting technology into realistic operational scenarios. xTechOverwatch exposed brittle technology by forcing the competition to operate across missions run by Soldiers. Overland welcomes this honest approach.”