Autonomous ATV? Cute. Autonomous ATV with Anduril sensors, electronic warfare capabilities, and a supporting drone? That’s a whole different ball game—and Overland AI just proved it’s possible.
Today, in an exclusive release to Tectonic, the ground autonomy company announced that it teamed up with Anduril to successfully demo a version of Overland AI’s ULTRA autonomous ATV integrated with a whole bunch of Anduril’s ISR and EW payloads, plus a drone overhead.
As we said yesterday, everyone loves a ground drone these days.
Boots on the ground: Overland AI 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.
In just a few years, the company has rolled out a number of offerings on the UGV and ground autonomy front:
- ULTRA: A fully autonomous tactical UGV with a payload-agnostic deck. Basically, an autonomous quad bike sans seat.
- OverDrive: Overland’s autonomy stack with the ability to perceive and map terrain with active and passive on-board sensors without relying on GPS or pre-mapped routes.
- OverWatch: 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 plug and play into pretty much any ground vehicle to turn it into a drone.
Loaded up: In the recent demo with Anduril, which Boots told Tectonic took place in “desert terrain you might find in Texas,” Overland kitted out the ULTRA UGV and OverDrive autonomy suite with Anduril’s kit to detect and track a group of small enemy drones across off-road terrain.
“One of the vehicles had a sensor on it, the other had an EW payload, and there was a [Ghost-X] drone flying overhead,” he said. “The drone can detect something of interest in the area, and humans then deploy the ground vehicles to put the sensor and effector into appropriate positions to provide overwatch and protection for the human force.”
According to Anduril, one ULTRA had a Pulsar-L EW system mounted onto it, and the other had four Spyglass radars. Overland’s ULTRAs and OverDrive autonomy stack were run through Anduril’s Lattice integration layer to make all those different sensors work together.
Boots couldn’t comment on who was present at the demo, but said Overland’s “pretty excited to show this off to the military,” especially the Army.
Teamwork: “The US Army has been asking for companies to come together, team up, and really show what capabilities they can bring to the warfighter,” he added. “We’ve been working with [Anduril] over the summer, looking at ways to collaborate and show how our technologies can be integrated to deliver the best effect for the warfighter.”
Overland’s been taking the Army’s push for teamwork to heart. Earlier this week, they partnered with autonomous targeting company AimLock to put AimLock’s autonomous targeting and engagement system onto Overland’s ULTRA to give the drone-car a lethal glow-up.
Given Anduril’s wide variety of payload offerings and involvement in the Army’s NGC2 initiative, Boots said, “They’re a natural partner for our platform, which now enables their payloads to be moved on the battlefield.”
As they say, teamwork makes the dreamwork.