Mission-Ready Ground Autonomy for Defense

DARPA pushed Overland to solve the hardest problem in ground autonomy right from the beginning of our company’s origin: building a reliable and resilient software stack that can be integrated into any ground vehicle. We have proven our autonomy on fleet vehicles, heavy platforms, and most recently on ULTRA, our own fully autonomous tactical vehicle built in-house and in production today. These efforts, spanning the entirety of the RACER program, have always been aimed at expanding the art of the possible with ground autonomy. But we also accelerated the moment autonomy became operationally fielded, which has meant that warfighters will have access to ground autonomy that is both proven and ready. DARPA accelerated our technology through RACER. And we are providing the results back to the warfighter today.

Nic Adams situates ground autonomy within the current policy moment, from the latest NDAA to themes underscored in Secretary Pete Hegseth's RNDF keynote on urgency, deterrence, and readiness. He argues that the U.S. Government must accelerate deployment of ground autonomy, a domain still nascent relative to air and maritime systems, and champion mature technologies like Overland's that are ready to iterate with warfighters in the field today.

Modern operations depend on connecting systems and sharing information between those systems. Disparate systems are not always designed to work together—the successful use of one technology does not guarantee integration with another. Integration of multiple systems, or the lack thereof, could determine the outcome of a future fight, and it must be solved with urgency. This is especially true on land, where unstructured terrain, response time, and comms‑denied environments introduce real operational constraints.