Marine Corps Pursues Multi-Purpose Ground Robot.

• Author: Easley, Mikayla
• Position: Innovation Nation

ARLINGTON, Virginia -- The Marine Corps is turning to unmanned ground vehicles that can shoulder the burden of moving supplies and perform dangerous missions.

The Marine Corps awarded a Small Business Innovation Research contract in September to Colorado-based Stratom to develop the Remote Expeditionary Autonomous Pioneer, or REAPr, system. The company will spend at least six months developing the unmanned ground vehicle that will be a "workforce multiplier" for the service, said Ross Wehner, senior analyst for corporate development and strategy at Stratom.

Wehner called REAPr a "Swiss Army knife" because it consolidates different missions--such as logistics, tool changing and mine clearing--in one unmanned platform.

"The idea is to create a single vehicle that can be versatile to address a lot of those challenges and objectives," he said.

The platform will be an off-road, remote-controlled vehicle that features an attachment system that can be retrofitted for specific missions with different instruments, including those already in the Marine Corps' toolbox, Wehner said. As a result, Marines can conduct dangerous expeditionary tasks from a distance, he said.

"Having the remote control capability... allows one operator to potentially control a number of different vehicles, but it also lets them do so from a secure location rather...