The US Army is preparing to test autonomous Ford F-250 pickup trucks in a training exercise, part of a broader effort to determine whether familiar commercial vehicles can perform dangerous battlefield jobs without soldiers.
Forterra, the defense-technology company supplying the trucks’ autonomous-driving system, says that the vehicles could eventually support missions such as route clearance and breaching, work that can require soldiers to spend hours searching mined roads and positioning explosives.
The Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps plans to experiment with four Forterra-equipped F-250s.
Ford’s popularity and readily available supply of parts could make the robotic trucks easier to maintain and repair, said Pat Acox, Forterra’s vice president of defense.
For many military systems, the Pentagon has notoriously complex supply chains for thousands of specialized parts available from only a small number of manufacturers, or in some cases, sole suppliers.
Spare part availability and delivery delays have been known to sideline military equipment for months, even years, and have contributed to equipment readiness problems.
Forterra’s autonomous software is already being integrated into the Marine Corps’ Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS), an anti-ship missile system built on the chassis of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.
The company has also delivered over 100 smaller, ruggedized vehicles to Ukraine that are already performing ground missions, Acox said. Those vehicles come complete with a Starlink internet antenna and can haul heavy loads up to nearly 1700 pounds.
Uncrewed ground vehicles are increasingly prolific in Ukraine, where they’ve been used to varying degrees of effectiveness for missions like assaults and casualty evacuation, reducing the risks to the troops facing constant threats from small aerial drones, particularly in front-line kill zones.
The battlefield in Ukraine has also exposed some limitations with remotely operated vehicles. Video feeds require significant bandwidth and can generate an electronic warfare signature that enemy forces might detect, Acox said.
Rather than being continuously driven by distant operators, vehicles can instead receive short, low-bandwidth commands similar to text messages or follow pre-programmed routes.
The Pentagon sees autonomous vehicles as a way to remove troops from dangerous, time-consuming work while freeing them for other missions, but systems have to be rugged and reliable enough to effectively take on human tasks in combat.