TL;DR
Forterra has deployed more than 100 autonomous all-terrain vehicles to Ukraine since October, completing 1,100 missions and 52 casualty evacuations. America’s largest combat UGV deployment.
Forterra, an American autonomous vehicle manufacturer, revealed that more than 100 of its autonomous all-terrain vehicles have been deployed to combat zones in Ukraine over the past nine months. The company says it is the largest combat deployment of autonomous ground vehicles by any U.S. defense technology company. Since their arrival in October, the vehicles have traveled more than 2,500 miles on more than 1,100 missions, transported 777,440 pounds of cargo and completed 52 casualty evacuations.
The Lancer vehicles are based on Polaris all-terrain vehicles equipped with a custom sensor and computing stack. They run on gas and can carry 750 kilograms, three times the capacity of Ukrainian battery-powered UGVs. “This UGV for logistics and simply to maintain our defense is the most important UGV in Ukraine.“one Ukrainian soldier told TechCrunch.”It’s fucking fantastic and we’re dying to have more.”
The deployment was funded with US defense dollars as part of the effort to transform the US military through its support of the Ukrainian resistance. Aerial drones have created extensive no-go zones where surveillance leads to death from above, leading Ukrainian strategists toward ground autonomy. Some Lancers have been lost in combat, particularly when they became trapped in deep mud where Russian forces can attack them. Adding a Starlink antenna was the modification that made the vehicles operationally useful. Ukraine’s unmanned warfare industry is already producing billion-dollar companiesand the Forterra implementation adds a layer of American hardware to that ecosystem.
The limits of autonomy are clear. Ukrainian soldiers teleoperate the vehicles primarily in combat zones, because autonomous systems cannot yet identify unexpected enemy forces and react appropriately. “We really need to be able to respond to enemy threats, live, while we’re in front of the enemy, something autonomy doesn’t know how to do yet,” the soldier said. Forterra is working to combine classical robotics algorithms with generative AI to enable more widespread reactions.
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The main demand of Ukrainian soldiers is cost reduction. Forterra’s Lancers use Polaris’ commercial supply chain to keep prices low, but they are still too valuable to be deployed as freely as drones. “Attrition is simply a fact on this battlefield, and we’ve lost some at this point, and it hurts, and we need more and therefore we need them cheaper,” the soldier told TechCrunch. The Pentagon’s push to master drones Forterra has raised more than $500 million in venture funding.
