Navy to do without prime contractors on new bomb disposal robots.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Unmanned Technology

* The Navy this year will begin constructing its next-generation of explosive ordnance disposal robots.

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But manufacturers hoping to score a big contract as a prime contractor on the program will be disappointed. Work on the technology will come piecemeal and the service intends to be its own lead systems integrator, said Byron Brezina, robotics technologist at the naval explosive ordnance disposal technology division.

At the outset of the Iraq war, when improvised explosive devices were taking service members' lives almost daily, the Navy rushed ready-made bomb disposal robots into the field. But Foster-Miller's Talon and iRobot's Packbot had their own proprietary software and hardware and their own logistical tails that required different replacement parts and technicians trained to fix them.

The rapid acquisition of these systems, which continues today, made sense at the time, Brezina said. But the new family of three robots will be built from the ground up without any commercial-off-the-shelf hardware or software, he said.

"It's time to move forward and have a true open architecture system," he said at an Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International conference.

The program will be a test of the Defense Department's modular open systems approach policy, which is designed to ensure that the services don't purchase proprietary technologies that make it costly and time consuming to add components.

The EOD family of robots will include a small version that can be carried in a backpack, a medium-sized variant equal in size to the Talons and Packbots carried in the back of trucks today, and a large-sized version that would be towed by a trailer and used for base and infrastructure protection.

Work will begin this year on the small, also known as the dismounted, version.

The Navy has identified nine subsystems that all three robots will share. The architecture will allow any future capabilities to be added if requirements change, Brezina said. More importantly, the government will own the architecture.

Currently, if EOD specialists ask for a new tool to be added to a bomb disposal robot, the manufacturer of the new device must coordinate with Foster-Miller or iRo-bot to integrate the new capability.

And that process doesn't always go smoothly, Brezina suggested.

Contracts will he awarded in the fourth quarter of this fiscal year for the subsystems: the power pack, the handheld controller's hardware and software...