One day last month, a very precious delivery arrived at autonomous vehicle company Applied Intuition’s garage: a Humvee and an infantry squad vehicle (ISV), sent by the Secretary of the Army, Daniel P. Driscoll, himself. He had visited the company’s headquarters with Army Chief of Staff Randy George a few days prior, seen the company’s fleet of autonomous aircraft and cars, and wanted to see what “cool stuff” they could do with some old-school military vehicles.
“They both expressed frustration at the slow pace of change…and they really wanted to make a big change,” Jason Brown, general manager for government at Applied Intuition, told Tectonic.
Within ten days, the company had managed to make the ISV fully autonomous, and turned the Humvee into a command vehicle that could oversee an integrated autonomous fleet, Brown said. For an Army looking to “transform” and rapidly scale up its autonomous capabilities, this was a pretty big deal.
“We knew that the thing that we had to do was show not just a capability that looked cool, but a capability that could be really an example of what Silicon Valley and venture-backed companies could do,” Brown said.
The ISV was tested at the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) in Louisiana just a few weeks later. Brown said they worked side-by-side with soldiers to adapt the autonomy software to meet real-time battlefield needs. That meant everything from updates to better work for a medevac, to building YouTube access into the vehicle’s interface. (That’s how a lot of soldiers figure out how to fix their kit, it turns out.)
Rise of the robots: The Army has long tried (and often failed) to bring more autonomy into US land forces. As the air has become crowded with drones, ground autonomy has lagged behind its flying, whizzy counterparts.
- The Army canceled its roughly $868M Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) program this year.
- The US still has a massive (and rapidly aging) fleet of traditional, human-operated kit—tanks, humvees, and ISVs galore.
- Not only are these vehicles more dangerous for soldiers (IEDs, anyone?), but they’re trickier to plug into an autonomous or hybrid fighting force, alongside more cutting-edge tech like aerial drones.
- The Army Transformation Initiative released at the beginning of May calls for a “leaner, more lethal force” using autonomous systems and reducing reliance on legacy platforms.
Companies like Applied Intuition are trying to help make this happen.
- The company was founded in 2017 as a commercial vehicle autonomy company and in 2018 expanded into defense. Last month, they also announced their expansion to the UK.
- The company’s bread-and-butter software is an autonomy testing kit that helps companies build their own autonomy software.
- Earlier this year, they bought EpiSci and with that moved into building their own autonomy software—essentially a tech stack that you can plug into any vehicle (land, sea, or air) to make it a drone.
- Back in March, the company raised a $250M Series E at a $6B valuation.
Plug and play: Brown said that the secret to why they were able to make the ISV autonomous so quickly is that, well, about 90% of vehicle autonomy software—no matter the domain—is the same. You just take that core and then “you go that 10% extra mile to make it appropriate for the domain or for the use case,” he said.
This approach means that—at least in theory—the Army could make swathes of its fleet autonomous without having to build new vehicles like the RCV. The Applied Intuition software used to make the vehicle autonomous is also open architecture—meaning it plays well with others.
Brown says he expects this to be tech that could benefit the Army at scale. “I think that vehicles are probably going to be the next thing… [We have] this massive opportunity to make them increasingly intelligent,” Brown said, “The military is starting to get that.”
Money, money, money: The writing on the wall seems to indicate the Army thinks so too. On June 5, the Army Contracting Command released a request for proposals (RFP) for something that sounds a whole hell of a lot like Applied’s ISV. They’re looking for autonomous robotic platforms (like the ISVs) that could work alongside a crewed “leader” vehicle (like the Humvee) and navigate on dirt trails and off-road.