Building better land systems: Software-defined, hardware-enabled

By Amber Walker , Senior Technical Director, Land Systems

On tomorrow’s battlefield, Soldiers will use autonomous robots and uncrewed ground vehicles to scout miles ahead of their formations. Acting as the vanguard for the manned-unmanned team, these intelligent systems will make first contact with adversaries and shape conditions for all phases of combat operations. They will rapidly gather and share information across the human-machine integrated formation while processing and fusing data to perform threat prioritization, track correlation, and coordinated effects. To do all of this, the 美国军队 has prioritized modernization efforts of the Next Generation Combat Vehicles Cross Functional Team , such as the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle and Robotic Combat Vehicle, which will help the Army maintain close combat overmatch against adversaries. That overmatch will be enabled by software.

Manned-unmanned teaming on the ground requires holistic vision and tight integration of at least four key components: vehicle, autonomy, payloads, and operator interface for command and control. All must be unified end-to-end to meet a fundamental need: collapsing the kill chain. In today’s ground vehicles this integration is enabled by the crew, which is highly trained in how to employ a vehicle’s combat sensors and effectors. In the future, this integration must be delivered through software, often autonomously or supervised by a remote operator.

Anduril’s Lattice software enables the integration of complex kill chains for warfighters to make better and faster decisions across all domains. Lattice takes data from disparate and distributed sensors, feeds, and systems and moves this data into a single integration layer, where AI, machine learning, and sensor data processing techniques are used to filter high-value information. This allows operators to react quickly to the data by tasking other systems such as sensors, vehicles, or other assets within the platform itself.

Integration such as this is fundamental to solving the operational challenges of warfighters now and in the decades ahead. At Anduril, we build mission capability, not just platforms. By adopting open and modular standards, highly-configurable payloads that can be tailored to multiple missions, and a software-first mindset, we can rapidly iterate our technologies and push timely updates to operators so they keep pace with the speed of modern war. The future of land systems will be no different.

Anduril has demonstrated the ability to integrate first and third-party components into autonomous mission capabilities on rapid time scales time and time again: We designed, productized, and deployed our autonomous counter-intrusion Sentry towers, multiple groups of unmanned aerial systems (UAS), Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems (CUAS) systems, the Anvil kinetic UAS-defeating drone, and other non-public products using internal research and development (IRAD) resources all within the last three years. From the development of robotic Sentry Towers that automate the detection and tracking of people and vehicles on the border and autonomous underwater vehicles to ALTIUS launched effects that communicate and coordinate as a team to perform complete missions, we believe that software integration is at the core of military effectiveness.

While ground-based systems present challenges unique to operating on land, the success or failure of next-generation combat vehicles against peer adversaries will, as in all other domains, depend on the tight integration of hardware and software that is flexible, extensible, and adaptive to a variety of missions so that Soldiers can rapidly sense, make sense of the battlefield, and take action to achieve mission success.

The software-defined path to a better ground vehicle

Significant progress has been made in ground autonomous mobility technology over the past decade. And yet, while innovation may have started with the DARPA Grand Challenge and the military, the commercial market and its billions of dollars spent on research and development has been the driving force behind the growing number of self-driving cars and autonomous trucks on America’s highways. Meanwhile, experimental efforts like the Army’s “leader-follower” approach have shown promise, but remain many years and millions of miles behind commercial offerings.

Still, the government has made strides toward embracing software best practices and greater interoperability. The adoption of Ground Combat Systems Common Infrastructure Architecture (GCIA) and Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA), for example, provides the government with flexibility and allows for different combinations of payloads and effects from various vendors to be “stitched” together without requiring costly engineering change proposals. Unfortunately, the lack of a standardized integration layer means that stitching together various government or commercial autonomy stacks, different payloads, and safety critical vehicle components still requires significant customization to make it work.

As a defense technology company, we are not daunted by this challenge. Indeed, Anduril is a leader in mission systems integration, with a proven record of integrating disparate, heterogeneous capabilities into a family of systems that can be employed effectively. Yet the technology of sensors, effectors, and commercial autonomy is now moving faster than ever before — and at different rates of technology refresh — so understanding and tying them all together through software remains critical to success.

We plan to share much more of our philosophy and approach to ground combat vehicles in the coming months — because today, Soldiers are mainly using manual processes to understand their surroundings, share information, and deliver effects on target. But tomorrow, Soldiers will need to do so far more rapidly and at greater distances, and that will require the delivery of capability at the intersection of hardware and software where Anduril is proud to lead.

Anduril Industries is a defense technology company with a mission to transform U.S. and Allied military capabilities with advanced technology. Learn more at Anduril.com →