WASHINGTON — The Army grappled with the difficult challenge of incorporating heavy robotic combat vehicles into its formations during a month-long experiment at Fort Carson, Colorado, and came away with a clearer path to bringing robots into the fold while it is still years away from ground robots fitting in seamlessly with units.
The Army has been evaluating the performance and possible utility of heavy RCVs through the use of roboticized M113 armored personnel carriers for over a year, but the experiment at Camp Red Devil at Fort Carson is the most complex to date.
“We’re taking a lot of technology, we’re experimenting and this experiment was 100 percent successful,” Brig. Gen. Ross Coffman, who is in charge of the Army’s combat vehicle modernization efforts, told reporters in an August 6 briefing, adding it was successful “because we learned. … The whole purpose was to learn where the technology is now and how we think we want to fight with it in the future.”
Coffman said that didn’t mean all of the technology was successful or that everything performed perfectly. “Some [technology] knocked our socks off and some, we’ve got a little bit of work to do. But that is why we do these things, so we can do it at small scales, so we can learn, save money, and then make decisions of how we want to fight in the future.”
In part the Army is tackling a physics problem as well as a technology challenge. The distance between the robot and the controller is just that kind of problem, Coffman said.
But the service has been able to find companies that can create waveforms to get the required megabytes per second to extend the range in the most challenging environments like dense forested areas, according to Coffman.
During the experimentation, Coffman said the Army tested the waveforms. “We went after them with [electronic warfare], we saw they were self-correcting, so that if they’re on one band, they can switch to another,” he said, “so we have a really good idea of what is in the realm of the possible today.”
And the service was able to almost double the range between controller and robot using the waveforms available, according to Coffman.
“If you could extend the battlefield up to two kilometers with a robot, then that means that you can make decisions before your enemy came and it gives you that trade space of decisions faster and more effectively against the enemy,” Coffman said.
The Army was also very pleased with the interface for the crew. The soldiers were able to see where they were, where the robots were, they could communicate and the graphics “just absolutely blows us away,” Coffman said.
The software between the robot and control vehicle (Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles) “while not perfect, performed better than we thought it would,” Coffman said.
And the software was able to allow for the robot to get out in front of the control vehicle by roughly 80 to 1,000 meters and identify hotspots and enemy locations. “I didn’t know how that was going to work,” Coffman said. “There were some challenges that we had like getting exact granularity at distance, but the ability that we could identify hotspots and enemy positions, I thought was absolutely exceptional.”
The Army, as a side experiment, also tested out a roboticized Stryker Infantry Combat Vehicle Dragoon, which is equipped with a 30mm cannon, as well using the same software and hardware in control vehicles, Coffman noted. The experiment included a live-firing.
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In the RCV-H surrogates, the target recognition worked while stationary, but part of the challenge the Army is tackling is how to do that on the move and how the information is passed to the gunner, he added.
Work on stability of the system across terrain also needs to be further advanced, but that was also indicative of using clunky, old M113s and turning them into robots rather than having a purpose-built vehicle like the RCV Medium and RCV Light will be.
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The Army awarded contracts to a Textron and Howe & Howe team to build the RCV-M and a QinetiQ North America and Pratt & Miller team to build the light version late last year and early this year. Those are being built now.
Training on the system also proved to be much easier than anticipated. Coffman said he asked how long the operators might need to train and was surprised to hear them say they needed roughly 30 minutes to learn. “I thought it was going to take them days, but our soldiers are so amazing and they grew up in this environment of gaming.”
Now that the first major experiment is wrapped up, the Army will be building up to a company-level operation in the first quarter of fiscal 2022 at Fort Hood, Texas. The experiment will also include four medium RCV prototypes and four light RCVs.
While the experimentation at Fort Carson was focused on cavalry operations where the robots served more in a scout mission and proved they could be effective in a reconnaissance and security role, the experiment in FY22 will move the robots into more of an “attack and defend” role, according to Coffman.
A new radio will be added to increase range as well as a tethered unmanned aerial vehicle and more leap-ahead target recognition capability that uses algorithms trained on synthetic data that is “truly cutting edge,” Coffman said.
After each of these experiments, Coffman said, the Army reaches a decision point where it decides how to proceed, whether that is more experimentation or a fielding decision.
“We have enough information tactically and technically that I believe we can move forward to the second experiment,” Coffman said.
Following the second experiment, the Army will reach a decision point in FY23 on whether to move the effort into an official program of record. Once that is decided, an acquisition strategy would be identified if the decision is to move forward, according to Coffman.
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