Marine Corps inks first contract for autonomous ground vehicle production A nearly $20 million contract aims to integrate autonomous ground vehicles in the service’s ground based air defense missions. The Marine Corps will pay Overland AI $19.7 million to produce more than a dozen autonomous ground vehicles by early 2027. The vehicles, due to be delivered in about nine months, will be part of the Marine Air Defense Integrated Systems program, which is part of the service’s counterdrone approach, and support resupply missions. “Ground autonomy matters now more than ever. We're seeing the proliferation of uncrewed ground vehicles in conflicts like the one in Ukraine, and tech maturity is really there,” Byron Boots, Overland AI’s CEO told reporters. “We're registering extremely high demand from U.S. operational units who want to incorporate this technology into their concepts of operation.” Overland recently demonstrated its autonomous offerings with the Marine Corps on a prototype for the Remotely Operated Ground Unit for Expeditionary Fires, or ROGUE Fires, program. The robot vehicle is expected to integrate with existing Marine Corps platforms, such as the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, or JLTV. “We're going to start by integrating the [autonomous ground] vehicle into the system, providing a resupply capability for the other vehicles…and we may build on it from there,” Boots said. The platform could potentially be used for other purposes, such as intelligence and surveillance. “We've used our autonomous ground vehicles for a wide variety of different mission sets, everything from resupply to ISR to breaching,” he said. “Our understanding is that they'll initially be used for resupply, but we believe that there'll be many different possible use cases and ways to integrate this vehicle into the program.” The company declined to specify the exact number of vehicles that would be produced or other contract details,