PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii—Robot boats. Counter-drone systems. A prototype Army landing craft. A million dollars in cash prizes. It’s all part of the Army’s effort to overcome logistics challenges in the Indo-Pacific and get new technology in the hands of soldiers more quickly.
Experimentation for the Army’s xTech contest started Sept. 9 with sunshirt-clad representatives from HavocAI wheeling small gray autonomous boats down a concrete ramp on Ford Island into the cerulean waters of Pearl Harbor. Soon, the boats were zipping through the harbor, protecting a Maneuver Support Vessel (Light) from an unnamed adversary. A total of 10 companies tested their tech as part of the contest.
On Thursday, three winners will take home $35,000 cash prizes, along with feedback from soldiers and technical experts that will help as they pursue a follow-on contract.
“We partnered with [U.S. Army Pacific] to identify some of their capability gaps, and invited industry to solve some of those [challenges]. Our goal is really to bring in new industry and offer them a friendly front door to the Army where they can propose their solutions, but also get that direct feedback from stakeholders,” said Jessica Stillman, project manager for the Army’s xTech program.
The 10 competing companies were winnowed from a pool of about 130 that submitted white papers after a call for solutions, Stillman said. About 44 percent of the companies that apply for these contests are new to the Defense Department, and the service tries “to make it as easy as possible” for them throughout the process.
“A lot of times we keep the problem statements pretty broad, because sometimes industry can tell us what we need,” she said. “You know, we don’t always know what industry is doing, and that’s the value of using our program, because it allows you to do that market research and understand what industry is developing, and can that apply to what the Army needs. It gives the Army the opportunity to bring in new innovation, and new companies into the pipeline, which is really great.”
Though xTech has run nearly 50 contests so far, this is the first that involves the competitors running scenarios in an experimentation environment, Stillman said.
The Pearl Harbor experiments deployed drone boats and counter-drone tech to protect a high-value asset, while experiments at inland Schofield Barracks focused on unexploded ordnance and electronic warfare.
The role of “high-value asset” for the exercise was played by a prototype logistics vessel called MSV(L)-01, carrying two Strykers on its reinforced aluminum deck. Vessel Master Chief Warrant Officer 2 Matthew Davis said the crew is testing the vessel to inform low-rate initial production.
“Today was kind of a two-birds, one-stone” situation, Davis said: testing the requirements of the vessel along with serving as an asset to be defended by the robot boats.
The MSV(L) was built as a replacement for the Vietnam-era Landing Craft Mechanized, for use in the Indo-Pacific, Davis said.
“This vessel offers an increased capability and capacity to what we already have,” he said. “The draft is shallower, so fully laden is 82 short tons… With that payload on board, we can still make 23 knots with only five and a half feet of draft,” so even loaded up, it can go straight to the beach and set its ramp on the sand, while other Army vessels require a port.
While this iteration of the contest is the first to include experiments, Stillman said the xTech office has three others lined up in the next three months with different commands.
“One of the things that senior leaders are focusing on right now is getting the technology into the hands of the soldiers,” she said. “This is the first step.”
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