The Australian Army has said that it has established an office to increase its adoption of disruptive technologies, in an effort to build on the momentum of Army’s previous efforts with these technologies last year.
Residing within the Future Land Warfare Branch of the Army’s Land Capability division, the role of the Robotic and Autonomous Systems Implementation Coordination Office (RICO) is the exploration, coordination and concept development using disruptive technology.
Director General of Future Land Warfare Brigadier Ian Langford said the RICO was “consistent with the CA’s vision of being future-ready by looking for opportunities to integrate technology as well as becoming a more intelligent customer”.
The RICO will use specialist personnel with Army’s total workforce model to advance knowledge in artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, robotics and autonomy. Projects that the office has undertaken include the demonstration of the ghost Robotics ground robot and the concept of optionally crewed combat vehicles (OCCVs).
The OCCVs were two M113 AS4s were converted to include: manual control, tele-operation, autonomous waypoint navigation, and follow the leader capabilities that were demonstrated in Canberra in October last year, in cooperation with Unmanned Aerial Systems and other ground robots.
The office will also focus on alternative power and energy, such as hybrid drive and additive manufacturing, along with autonomous leader-follower trucks. The latter project saw two medium trucks converted to optionally crewed vehicles in collaboration with a university partner.
The truck was able to operate in manual, tele-operation, leader follower and GPS waypoint navigation modes, and includes a collision avoidance feature which detects mobile and static obstacles and machine learning to manoeuvre around the obstacle.
“The opportunities presented by disruptive technology have to be understood early if we are to exploit our capability edge.” Brigadier Langford said.
Other projects the office has undertaken include human-machine teaming and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) trials that undertook multiple activities with combat and logistic soldiers to gain insights into potential future applications for UGVs.
