A GM Defense [GM[ official has said the company’s new teaming agreement with Anduril Industries
will focus on developing “disruptive technology” to meet emerging battlefield needs.
The two firms announced their plans to work together on Tuesday, and said the partnership will include a focus on “delivering autonomy solutions, battery electrification and other new propulsion technologies, as well as those integrating the full range of Anduril technologies onto GM Defense mobility solutions.”
“It’s a cooperative teaming agreement that we’re working on to make disruptive technology. It’s setting up a framework where we can say, for example, we’ve got electrification technologies, what can we pair it up with for your products and vice versa,” Ben Davis, GM Defense’s senior manager for business creation, told Defense Daily during an interview at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
At the conference, GM Defense brought a two-seat Multi-Mission and Logistics variant of its Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV) equipped with an Anduril launcher for its Altius loitering munitions. Meanwhile, Anduril had the standard nine-seat variant ISV at its booth outfitted with another version of its Altius drone launcher.
GM Defense is currently delivering ISVs to the Army, with the program approved for full-rate production earlier this year (Defense Daily, April 5).
Amber Walker, Anduril’s senior technical director for land systems, told Defense Daily discussions with GM Defense on working together date back about a year.
“[We were] really looking at where the Army was modernizing and the types of commercial applications that were going to be required to meet the needs. So it became pretty obvious pretty early that the commerciality of both companies was a big draw for us to work together,” Walker said.
Walker cited opportunities to integrate Anduril’s Lattice software operating platform with GM Defense’s hardware platform offerings as “part of the draw of the partnership.”
“We’re pretty hardware-agnostic in terms of how Lattice is applied. And GM Defense has a family of vehicles that we can kind of equally access,” Walker said. “[Lattice] rapidly integrates multiple data streams, sensors and effectors and provides the user with an integrated picture and a way to interact with their environment. So on something like the Infantry Squad Vehicle or XM-30 or any other combat vehicle, we have a screen that the user can interact with [and can provide information] on the payload, the onboard vehicle itself, the status and health of the vehicle as well as potential inorganic data feeds, things that are coming from overhead access.”
Anduril in May detailed an evolved version of its Lattice “software backbone” that enables the large-scale integration and use of autonomous systems under human supervision across the mission cycle, including from planning and exercise to execution and post-operational analysis and lessons learned (Defense Daily, May 3).