Overland AI lands Pentagon contract to produce autonomous ground vehicles for Marine Corps
Overland AI has secured a production contract for autonomous ground vehicles that will provide resupply for Marine Air Defense Integrated Systems, the company announced Monday.
The $20 million deal was spurred by the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) initiative, which is run by the Pentagon’s Research and Engineering directorate, according to a press release.
During a media roundtable, Overland AI co-founder and CEO Byron Boots told DefenseScoop that initial deliveries of the AGVs are scheduled to begin about nine months after contract award. He declined to say exactly how many vehicles will be provided under the deal, but he stated that there will be “more than a dozen.”
The company’s AGVs are currently not intended to replace the Joint Light Tactical Vehicles that are part of the Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS) architecture, according to Boots.
MADIS is designed to be a maneuverable apparatus that can detect and defeat adversary drones and manned aircraft. It consists of two JLTVs that carry sensors and weapons, such as 30mm cannons, Stinger missiles and electronic warfare tools.
Overland AI’s autonomous ground vehicle is “not intended to replace the JLTV,” Boots told DefenseScoop. “We’re going to start by integrating the [company’s autonomous ground] vehicle into the system, providing a resupply capability for the other vehicles which are part of the system. And we may build on it from there, but that’s kind of how the program is starting.”
According to the Pentagon, the $20 million other transaction agreement includes not just the hardware for the autonomous UGVs but also the contractor’s OverWatch and OverDrive software, spares, and services.
OverDrive is an autonomy stack and OverWatch is a command-and-control system.
“I also just want to continue to draw a distinction between an uncrewed ground vehicle and an autonomous ground vehicle,” Boots told reporters. “Autonomous ground vehicles are uncrewed, but they also have software and sensors and compute on board, which allows them to autonomously move through terrain and on the battlefield. And there’s several advantages to this. One is that they’re less susceptible to contested comms, they can continue to operate even if they lose connectivity. And second, it really allows for scaling. A single operator can task multiple vehicles if each of those vehicles has autonomous capabilities. So that’s how we’re thinking about it.”
Boots said the AGV that the company will provide to the Marine Corps is “fully autonomous,” explaining that “it can perceive the environment, represent it, plan through it, and control the vehicle, so you can tell it where to go, and it will make the decisions on board in order to get there.”
A human operator can take control of the system if they want to, he noted.
He described the platform as a “light” vehicle, but he declined to provide the specs or disclose its payload capacity.
“Our understanding is that they’ll initially be used for resupply, but we believe that there’ll be many different possible use cases and ways to integrate this vehicle into the program,” Boots said.
The company has already integrated about 30 payloads onto its autonomous ground vehicles, according to Boots.
“You can put pretty much anything that you want onto these vehicles, you know, within the [size, weight and power] capacity,” he said. “Obviously intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, using them for resupply. … We’ve put tethered drones and other types of payloads on board as well. So really the payload applications here are limitless. You can imagine what you might be able to do with a vehicle like this.”
He pointed to the Ukraine-Russia war as an example of the utility and proliferation of that type of military technology.
“I think there’s a revolution in land warfare happening in Ukraine, and the use of uncrewed ground vehicles is part of that story. And the way that we view this is that uncrewed vehicles really provide soldiers … and Marines with safety and standoff, so the ability to remove a human from a point of contact to keep them safe during operations,” Boots said.
Overland AI is “registering extremely high demand from U.S. operational units who want to incorporate this technology into their concepts of operation,” he told reporters.
“The thing that we’re really excited about here is the fact that we are at a point where the U.S. military is really seeing the utility of vehicles like this and has moved beyond experimentation and prototyping to production contracts, and we’re excited to lead the way there,” he said.
