The most vulnerable part of a military truck is the driver. The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), charged with finding and integrating new commercial technology into the military, has set a June 13 deadline for ideas on how to robotize the military’s existing fleet of transport trucks. Those vehicles include rides like the Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck or the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV, also known as a Humvee).
Under a program called Ground Expeditionary Autonomy Retrofit System (GEARS), DIU wants suppliers to prove they can automate vehicle operation, with six converted vehicles per year after contract award and up to 50 or more vehicles converted within two and a half years of contract award.
GEARS is the latest in what the Pentagon has done for nearly two decades to solve an enduring problem from its recent wars. Deploying troops and equipment to a war zone, whether it be an entire country or even a long front within one country, means detaining people in places where supply infrastructure is limited, and that requires a way to to supply.
If there is no threat of violence against the trucking industry, military supplies can mirror logistics in the domestic United States, where truckers bring supplies as needed. When violence threatens, as in both insurgency and conventional warfare, trucks are threatened by ambushes, roadside bombs or aerial attacks in the form of rockets, artillery or bombs. Robotizing transport doesn’t completely eliminate that risk, but it does mean that any vehicle that comes under attack will only result in lost supplies and equipment, rather than killed or captured soldiers.
“The Department of Defense (DoD) has an existing fleet of military vehicles for its logistics operations. Today, however, these vehicles require human drivers. In deployment situations, this creates unnecessary risk to service members’ lives and introduces limits to operational tactics,” it reads. request from DIU. “Human operators also have cycles from work to rest, resulting in additional time pressure. In a rapidly evolving conflict, the ability to continually move supplies from one hub to another will have significant implications for the ability to support operations while maintaining troop security.
[Related: The UK is upgrading military buggies into self-driving vehicles]
By replacing human drivers with driverless systems, the military can overcome the vulnerability of sending people on milk rides, and such vehicles can push the limits of people needing to eat, sleep and rest. Continuous supply allows cargo to be shipped to where it is needed as soon as it is ready.
Early in the US war in Iraq, transporting supplies around the country reliably and safely meant deploying convoys, where several trucks would carry guards and be escorted by other vehicles. While convoys allow supplies to be protected along the way and make use of numbers to do so, they also make a juicy target. As the contours of the fighting in Iraq turned into what is now two decades of US presence in the country, convoys keep as a target of opportunity for groups seeking to harm or disrupt the US military in the country.
In 2004, DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky projects wing, launched a major challenge, offering a prize to teams that could autonomously navigate a vehicle on a course in the desert. The 2004 challenge ended in total failure, but multiple vehicles completed the 2005 version, at a time widely cited as the beginning of autonomous driving for both commercial and military needs.
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With GEARS, DIU tries to get commercial tools and techniques back on track. To that end, the government is making the vehicles available to use as test benches for prototypes, consistent with the Army’s existing cargo fleet and part of the Army’s palletized loading system. In addition, the new add-on systems should work Tactical wheeled vehicles (that’s army transports including Humvees and the like) and trailers. By modifying these existing vehicles with new software and sensor hardware in what should be simple conversions, the military can acquire a new capability without needing new vehicle body developments to enable unmanned operations.
“Solutions must have the ability to operate in environments inherent in military operations,” the request reads. “Desired mission sets include, but are not limited to, convoy operations, waypoint navigation, and teleoperations. Solutions must be built according to open architecture standards and be able to integrate new hardware, software and features as they become available.”
However the teams come, the goal is to have vehicles that can drive without a human being in the driver’s seat, or at least move the human to a remote seat and let them drive from there. By removing the human driver from the road vehicle, the supply truck essentially becomes a reusable package for goods, rather than a primary military target. Assets can still be lost in attacks, although reliable remote navigation will let the military know when and where such attacks have occurred.
Meanwhile, the military can supply its bases less like caravans under attack, and more like nodes in a vast transportation network.