Area of Interest (AoI) Statement: Autonomous Transport Vehicle - System

Problem

The Department of Defense (DoD) has an existing fleet of military vehicles for its logistics operations. Today, however, these vehicles require human operators. In deployed situations, this creates unnecessary risk to service members' lives and introduces limits to operational tactics. Human operators also have work-to-rest cycles, resulting in additional time constraints. In a fast-moving conflict, the ability to continuously move supplies from one hub to another will have significant impacts on the abilities to sustain operations while maintaining the safety of troops.

Desired Solution Attributes

The DoD seeks commercial solutions to convert existing military vehicles into uncrewed vehicles. These systems should be designed to deploy onto the Army’s Palletized Load System (PLS), with the ability to be adapted to other vehicles within the family of Tactical Wheeled Vehicles and other vehicles within the DoD’s fleet.

The government is seeking vendors that can take existing military vehicles—including subsystems, such as trailers—and enhance them for safe, reliable, robust uncrewed operations through hardware and software integration. Solutions for both hardware and software components will be considered. This may include but is not limited to: networking and communications systems, autonomy critical hardware (sensors, compute, etc.), graphical user interfaces for vehicle command and control, teleoperation enhancements, and autonomous navigation software.

Solutions must have the ability to operate in environments inherent to military operations. Desired mission sets include, but are not limited to, convoy operations, waypoint navigation, and teleoperations. Solutions should be built to open architecture standards and be capable of integrating new hardware, software, and features as they become available.

The government will provide the vehicles required for prototyping as government furnished equipment (GFE). The government will also provide a suite of GFE and government furnished information (GFI), which vendors are not required to use, but can leverage for their solutions. This suite of government furnished solutions includes (but is not necessarily limited to): autonomous navigation software, interfaces, protocols, safety compute systems, modeling and simulation suites, and graphical user interfaces for vehicle command and control. Further information about GFE and GFI will be made available for vendors selected by the Government after phase one in accordance with the CSO process.

Vendors should be able to convert up to six vehicles within 12 months of contract award, and the possibility for up to 50 or more vehicles integrated by 30 months of contract award.

The government understands that companies will likely not be able to meet all of the specifications in this solicitation, but encourage companies with demonstrable capability applicable to one or more of these specifications to apply. Preference will be given to vendors, or teams of vendors, that show a capability for generating an end-to-end solution. Vendors who propose solutions using a teaming and/or prime subcontractor arrangement, which combine multiple solutions into one, are highly encouraged to submit such solutions individually, as well as together.

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