Army moving out with cheaper Robotic Combat Vehicle competition, but with a new name

WASHINGTON — After a second scrapped attempt at fielding Robotic Combat Vehicles (RCV), the US Army is taking another crack but with plans to cap the per unit cost at $650,000, according to a new notice to industry.

“The Army seeks UGCRV [Unmanned Ground Commercial Robotic Vehicles] prototypes to meet emerging requirements in the form of desired characteristics in support of future operations on the battlefield,” a recent request for information obtained by Breaking Defense said. 

This time around, service officials are eyeing a ground robot with a price tag below $650,000 that can carry a payload of more than 2,200 pounds while traversing both on and off roads to keep up with soldiers inside Armored Brigade Combat Teams.

That presolication, published Friday by the National Advanced Mobility Consortium to its members, comes after decades of failed attempts trying to field unmanned ground vehicles including the service’s recent decision to halt a second RCV competition. After conducting a revamped competition, Breaking Defense first reported that industry sources had been notified that Textron Systems’s Ripsaw 3 had won that RCV competition, and the service was preparing to ink a deal with the victors. But around that same time, Army leaders identified RCV as a program to cut as part of the 8 percent budget drill to realign funding toward higher priorities, one service official told Breaking Defense then.

“We need robotic combat vehicles, but we want a consortium of vendors to bring their robotics and the best software folk,” that Army source explained. “We don’t want to downselect just to one vendor and pay almost $3 million per copy.”

The release of the new robotic RFI paves a possible way forward with an Aug. 29 deadline for interested companies to respond, and provides some additional insights into a laundry list of potential requirements for a ground robot fleet.

Soldiers should be able to control them via “basic teleoperation” (i.e., remote control) but it should also have autonomy software included for waypoint navigation, leader-follower and sentry mode. At the same time, “autonomy hardware selection shall not create any operational degradation to mission execution.”

The unmanned vehicles should also be to travel at least 34 miles per hour on road and 25 mph off road for at least 140 miles, and have a 360-degree visual, thermal, and audio sensing capability.

As for the minimum 2,200-pound payload capacity, the document notes the robots might be outfitted with counter-unmanned aerial vehicles capabilities, beyond line-of-sight kinetic effects, both attack and defensive electronic warfare, and more.