WASHINGTON — The US arm of British defense giant BAE Systems and Forterra, a company specializing in “driverless technology,” announced a partnership today to develop a prototype version of anArmored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV) outfitted with autonomous capabilities by 2026.
“This partnership isn’t about buzzwords — it’s about rolling up our sleeves and presenting tangible options that empower the Army to maintain its dominance on any battlefield against any current or emerging threat,” Bill Sheehy, Ground Maneuver product line director for BAE, said in a company release today. “Bringing together two of the best in both worlds — to include combat vehicle production and autonomous technology development — means we can move faster, think bigger, and give Soldiers the edge they deserve.”
Today’s announcement comes after BAE Systems launched a program last month to produce a number of “technologically advanced” AMPV prototypes rigged with “different capability kits” using the company’s internal investment funds, BAE announced at the time.
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In regards to Forterra’s responsibility of integrating autonomy into the vehicle, the company will harness its technology stack called AutoDrive, according to today’s announcement. AutoDrive is a suite of software and hardware capabilities that can be either retrofitted onto a platform or built in partnership with an original equipment manufacturer, Scott Sanders, chief growth officer at Forterra, told Breaking Defense in a recent interview.
“The capability consists of high-performance safety-critical compute, sensors, communications, user interfaces and networking, so that you can give those commands to the robot from hopefully anywhere in the world, as long as you know the comms pathway and give the user feedback to know what those systems are doing and how they collaborate,” he said.
“So what AutoDrive is doing is taking all that visual perception, fusing it into an environment that the algorithms can understand, and then creating those paths to operate, both from going from point A to point B, and also collaboratively with the other robots so that you have an effect on target,” he said.
Today’s announcement added that Forterra’s AutoDrive is “also compatible with other modern systems fighting in the U.S. Army’s Armored Brigade Combat Team today, including the Bradley A4 and the M109A7 Paladin Self-Propelled Howitzer.”