United States Marine Corps/Robotics Technology Consortium Cargo Unmanned Ground Vehicle

The increasing level of technical functionality demonstrated by progressive unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) has liberated them from the highly constrained environments of research laboratories and rigidly structured scenarios, and has transformed consideration of their use in military operational environments from hypothetical to imperative.

The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and the Joint Ground Robotics Enterprise Robotics Technology Consortium have sponsored a program which began in July 2010 to demonstrate the ability to integrate an Oshkosh Corporation autonomous system into a tactical vehicle capable of hauling a 7-ton payload cross-country. This initiative is intended to determine the feasibility of reducing the exposure of Marines to lethal attacks by replacing some of the manned vehicles in logistics convoys with unmanned vehicles, as well as to assess the feasi-bility of having autonomous vehicles act as a resupply multiplier through one-to-many operator control.

Latest