Companies vie for chance to update bomb disposal robots.

• Author: Insinna, Valerie

* With a chance to build the Navy's next bomb-disposal robots at their finger-tips, unmanned systems manufacturers have an opportunity to tap into one of the only fully funded programs in the autonomous vehicle pipeline. Eager industry officials believe a contract award is imminent.

Whichever company lands a contract to become lead systems integrator for the first of the Navy's three new unmanned ground vehicles will get a leg up on the competition--losing candidates will have to forage for less lucrative opportunities to build components.

The Advanced Explosive Ordnance Disposal Robot System, or AEODRS, has been alternately touted by the Navy and blasted by industry for its modular, open-architecture requirements, which means one company can't take the whole cake.

The Defense Department started buying robots in the 1980s by opting for modified commercial-off-the-shelf platforms from different vendors, said Byron Brezina, a technical engineering project manager for the Naval Explosive Ordinance Disposal Technology Division, located in Indian Head, Md. That approach left the military with proprietary systems that are difficult to update and modify.

Upgrading current robots is an "endless cycle" that is further complicated when the military wants to put a sensor or payload from company A onto company B's robot, he said at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's program review in March. "So you're seeing those R&D costs, those integration costs being doubled and tripled each time something has to be updated," he said.

Instead of a single company developing one or all of the bomb-disposal robots, vendors will compete to build one or more of the robot's components, which will be assembled by the systems integrator of each platform.

The hope is that these robots, which will be the military's fourth generation of unmanned ground vehicles, will allow the Navy to bring new technology to the field more quickly.

"We've learned these lessons ... the hard way by having robots in theater and having new threats and requirements come out fast and furiously," Brezina said. "The open architecture is going to allow us to respond to those quicker, cut down that lead time. It's also going to help us mitigate technology obsolescence, which is a problem on all DoD tools."

The first and smallest robot to be developed is a system for dismounted operations, also called increment 1, which is designed for reconnaissance missions. At 35 pounds, it...