Army negotiating contract for autonomy software for robotic initiative

SMD 2025 — With the US Army pulling back from its own, internally developed ground autonomy software, it is currently negotiating a deal with a company to integrate commercial solutions into two platoons of ground robots, according to Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch.

“This was a decision to move away from just a government solution for autonomy, and bring in the best of industry to help, because we’re going to need them in the long run,” the three-star general in charge of the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) told Breaking Defense today.

“We’re in negotiations right now to award a contract, to bring in some industry partners to help us in the areas of autonomy,” he later added. 

The Army has spent years internally developing an autonomy package called the Robotic Technology Kernel (RTK), later rebranded as the Army Robotic Common Software, meant to be the software backbone of an envisioned ground robotic fleet. However, delays and questions mounted regarding its viability for use with programs like the Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV).

So for another initiative, dubbed the Human Machine Integrated Formation (HMIF), Rasch said the Army is looking elsewhere to solve that particularly tricky technical problem. HMIF is a concept designed to explore integrating robots and autonomous systems into Army formations.

“I can’t say who the company is yet, until we actually award the contract, but it’ll be this fiscal year,” Rasch said. Once the deal is inked, the company will be tasked with integrating the autonomy software into the ground robots the service already has on hand, and working on the Warfighter Machine Interface.

Then, between October and December 2026, those two platoons-worth of upgraded robots will be handed back over to the Army and used by soldiers in a National Training Center rotation. 

“How can we make the science and art of one human being able to control lots of different things easy enough to where I don’t have to have four operators controlling a [single] robot?” Rasch asked. “I [want to] have one operator controlling four robots with their payloads.”

Work on HMIF, he said, may also shape the path ahead for RCV. In early March, Breaking Defense first reported that industry sources had been notified that Textron Systems’s Ripsaw 3 had won the RCV competition and the service was preparing to ink a deal with the victors. But around that same time, service leaders identified RCV as one program to cut as part of the 8 percent budget drill to realign funding toward higher priorities, one service official told Breaking Defense.

While the service appears to have put the breaks on the program, lawmakers also added $92.5 million to its reconciliation spending bill for the Army to use for completing RCV prototyping.

“There’s still some decisions that the Army is weighing on how they want to proceed [with RCV] from the overall autonomy perspective,” Rasch explained. “I can’t get ahead of those Army decisions … but my hope is that the work that we’re doing on HMIF will inform that overall strategy.”