Army picks Carnegie, Forterra for autonomous logistics truck prototyping

WASHINGTON — The US Army has quietly selected two companies to develop and test autonomous logistics trucks, with officials hoping to get them into the fleet as soon as 2027 — if budgets allow.

Officials from the Army and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) told Breaking Defense Tuesday that both Carnegie Robotics and Forterra have been selected to move forward with prototyping work on the Autonomous Transport Vehicle System (ATV-S) ahead of a mid-fiscal 2026 decision point that could narrow the field to a single winner.

The Army and DIU did not disclose how much funding each team received under the new deals or when those contracts were awarded. In fact, no official announcement was ever made, with the revelation that a downselect was complete only coming to light Tuesday during comments from Army officials, including Maj. Gen Michelle Donahue, the commanding general for the Army’s Combined Arms Support Command/Sustainment Center of Excellence.

“We must optimize the combinations of humans and machines to increase lethality, survivability and agility, while streamlining and reducing and anticipating those logistics burdens,” Donahue said at the National Defense Industrial Association’s tactical wheeled vehicles conference. “The integration of autonomous systems for resupply, maintenance and energy distribution will be a game changer.”

“We will capitalize on ATV-S autonomous replenishment of critical commodities to extend the division commander’s operational reach and his endurance, or her endurance,” Donahue later added. “We expect our divisional composite truck companies to increase sustained throughput by 50 percent while autonomously navigating varied and unpredictable routes while maintaining continuous movement.”

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Getting to this point hasn’t been a direct line for the service. 

After plowing ahead developing the Expedient Leader Follower (ExLF) for several years — an effort to outfit Oshkosh Defense’s Palletized Load System trucks with autonomy software — in 2023 the service began sunsetting work on that developmental initiative and returning the vehicles back to the fleet without the autonomy packages. The new aim was to find commercial solutions under an acquisition pathway dubbed ATV-S.

DIU began supporting that work, in part by standing up the Ground Expeditionary Autonomous Retrofit System (GEARS) project.

Then in 2023, DIU selected three teams — Carnegie Robotics, Forterra and Neya Systems — to spend a year developing and testing viable prototypes that could eventually be scaled for mass production.

“We made a lot of headway on this program, really, in the last approximately 18 months, we went from…experimentation, to let’s get it onto a program timeline to field to multiple units over time,” Kyle Bruner, the project manager for force projection under Donahue’s command, said on Tuesday.

Now with the downselect to two teams, the initiative is officially in phase two with the goal of eventually having PLA A2 heavy expanded mobility tactical trucks (HEMTTs) roll off the production line with a “digital backbone” ready for the autonomy suites.

As for picking a winner to provide that autonomy solution, the Army wants to begin phase two testing later this summer. However, Bruner and Donahue said the stalled FY25 defense bill on Capitol Hill could derail that plan. Since Congress has not yet passed a defense spending bill for this year, the department is operating under a continuing resolution that maintains FY24 spending levels, and that’s a problem for the ATV-S.

“I said 12 to 18 months [for fielding]. It could even be 24 months…if we can’t go forth with the final source selection for that capability,” Donahue said. Such a decision would be delayed if the service and DIU do not have funds to test out ATV-S prototypes as planned.

That testing roadmap, the duo separately explained, involves using some form of the autonomous trucks at the upcoming Project Convergence capstone event at Ft. Irwin, Calif. next month. Soldiers inside the 3rd Infantry Division at Ft. Stewart in Georgia, will also take their turn with the ATV-S prototypes as part of the upcoming transformation in contact 2.0 push.