#336 Byron Boots - He Turned a Polaris RZR Into a Self-Driving Military Vehicle

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“Fire and boots. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's awesome to be here.”

So awesome to have you. So I can't even remember. I think I actually found you guys on LinkedIn, which I haven't ever on. And I think I saw like a video on LinkedIn or something of Overland AI, and then sort of found you guys on YouTube and started following you. And then found out ABC is an investor. And so, or led you around. And so, yeah, wanted to get in touch and love what you guys are doing. Looks, you know, I've had lots of tech giants on here.

“A lot of drone stuff, surround, I put the water stuff. I guess they, I didn't even know your guy just told me I'll back that they just hit the hit up.”

Yeah, pretty pretty amazing. So, you know, first of all, it's an honor to be on the show. And in that company, I mean, that's that's incredible, but yeah, just in the last day or so there was news of

Seronics, boats being used in offensive operation in the state of Formus. Wow. And so you're the ground guy. That's right. You're bringing out autonomous vehicles to land warfare. So, really excited to get into dig into this, but let me, let me kick it off with the introduction here. Byron Boots, you're the co-founder and CEO of Overland AI, a company building autonomous ground vehicles for the US military. Before founding Overland AI, you earned your PhD in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon. became a professor at the University of Washington and led the winning team in DARPA's Racer off-road autonomy program. Overland AI is raised more than $140 million and become the first autonomous ground vehicle company to win a production contract with a fully integrated hardware and software platform.

Congratulations. Your vehicles are already being used by the military units around the world to move supplies, support operations, and reduce risk for soldiers in the field. Welcome to the show.

Well, thank you so much. Got a lot to talk about here. It's been a minute since I've talked to somebody that's doing the kind of stuff that you're doing, but before we get going, got a couple of things to crank out here. Everybody gets a gift. Oh, wow. Those are, thank you. Autonomous dummy bears. I'm excited. I love going to be nice. Right on. And I got a question for you. I got a Patreon. It's a subscription account. And so they're the reason I get to sit down here with you today. And so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question. So this is from Thomas W. You've dedicated your career to advancing robotics and AI, including technologies with defense applications from your perspective.

“What responsibility do scientists and engineers have to ensure these innovations ultimately reduce human suffering rather than prolonged conflict?”

And do you believe AI in autonomous systems could one day become tools that prevent wars through deterrence and de-esculation? Or do they risk making armed conflict more frequent and easier to justify?

It's a great, great question. I think autonomous systems, they're like any other tool. The way that I think about them is really a tool, a technology and in the context of defense.

It is something which allows a war fighter to be safer, right? So it reduces exposure, pulls them away from the point of contact. And then also potentially provides force multiplication on the battlefield. I'm sure we'll get into some of these things, but it is a tool which is used by humans. And so how you use them is really, I think, a human question. So in the context of saving lives, I think that they will save lives for our war fighters on the battlefield. It's very clear how they do that.

And our adversaries will see that. And so in that way, they can certainly serve as a deterrence as well. Right on. I mean, yeah, watching some of the models you showed me outside and then, you know, the videos and how they're going to be integrated in with the war fighters and combat.

“I mean, it's, you know, there's a former seal. Seeing what seeing the war, what war has developed into is, I mean, it's a fascinating and I mean, just it's been over 20 years since I've been on the ground in a war.”

And well, I guess not, but still been over 10 years. But I mean, I already have tons of questions and I can see so many different applications where this would be useful in just so many different scenarios.

Yeah, we should, we should definitely get into it. Before we do that though, I do want to give you a gift as well. So if you don't mind. So let me.

Come over here and we got you a chair. Now, this isn't just any chair. Right on. This is, it looks kind of like an office chair, but this is actually a seat from one of the vehicles. So as I was explaining earlier, we pulled the seats out of the Polaris range as we turned them into those autonomous vehicles that we saw outside. Well, what did you do with the seats? Once you've pulled them from the vehicle, we make them like the chair. So we made one for you. Yeah, thank you. We can check it out, but it's awesome. Yeah, yeah.

There you go.

Put this in the office. Thank you. Yeah, of course. That's awesome.

“All right, Byron. So before we get into everything over land AI, how did that suit a little backstory on you? Where did you grow up? How did you get into this stuff? I mean, what's the backstory here?”

Yeah, I had a whole career before moving into the fence tech. So I grew up outside in New York in Connecticut. I was into computers and was in the Boy Scouts and played sports and I think a pretty typical upbringing. So, you know, that's maybe where things got started. Just love the outdoors and taking apart computers and playing video games and doing all the sorts of things that the kids often do. Did you watch the Terminator grown up? I sure did. Yeah. So Terminator 2 was an unbelievable, unbelievable movie.

You know, and you know, happy to talk about that a little bit more in the context of of what we're building, but obviously robotics and science fiction were something that I really enjoyed. Were you a gamer? Yeah, I used to play. So back when I was in high school, he used to play Starcraft. It's like quite a bit. Starcraft 1 was before Starcraft 2 came out. So real time strategy games. I did a lot of played a lot of games like that. We talked about workcraft before, you know, I used to play that too.

So that was really what I was most drawn to, but yeah, I mean love computer games. How I mean, well, we'll get into a later. I was going to ask how similar you know is what's happening today is control and more of those games. We'll get into that in a little bit.

“So, what did you, where did you go to school? What did you go to school for?”

So I went to college at a small liberal arts school called Bowden College. It's in Maine. And you know, I spent four years there. I was a computer science and philosophy double major as an undergrad. I started out really thinking about, you know, I love computer science, like I said, you know, all through high school. I also really like history. I read a lot of history. And so when I went to college, I was thinking about maybe double majoring in computer science and history. I thought it would be cool to have a more technical degree and something which is, you know, more humanities oriented with history.

But I quickly, you know, sort of figured out my first year that, well, I love history. It involved tons of reading and things like this that I really like to do, but also involved foreign languages.

And you need to actually read about, you know, about history through contemporary sources and, you know, in the language that that folks wrote in.

And so, you know, I brought that together with computer science and majoring in both of those areas as an undergrad.

“Ventures like you're fascinating with the brain too, right?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, in undergrad, I was, you know, I was taking computer science and, you know, took courses in artificial intelligence and started to do research in robotics. And this is back, you know, over 20 years ago. They had artificial intelligence courses 20 years ago.

Yeah, it was pretty interesting. So, my, my university is a small school. There was only four faculty in the computer science department there.

And at the time, computer science was seen as like an offshoot of mathematics. And so, you know, a lot of these smaller schools had combined departments of computer science and mathematics and you take a lot of courses in both areas. But at Bowden, two of the four professors were actually folks who studied artificial intelligence. So, it was something, you know, it's been around for a long time. I mean, people were working on aspects of AI, you know, back in the 70s and 80s. But it was just starting to kind of come to the forefront and be an area that was, you know, really starting to accelerate around, you know, 2001.

And when I was, when I was an undergrad. So, started to study AI there and then in philosophy, I was thinking about things like philosophy of mind and philosophy of science and you just kind of trying to understand how the human mind worked. Well, yeah.

“I think that's an interesting discussion. So, yeah, how, I mean, how deep did you get into that before you kind of switch gears?”

Yeah. So, as a, again, as an undergrad, a double major in computer science and philosophy and when I graduated, I was, you know, thinking about what I wanted to do next.

I initially took a job at a robotics company as an engineer, basically working on problems related to perception and mapping and robotic systems.

So, these were mobile robots, much smaller than the ones that we just saw outside. So, robots that were about, you know, about this big, that moved around inside of buildings. And you have to determine where they are and how they get from one place to another and things like that. So, I worked as an engineer, working on those sorts of problems. But I was really thinking about, you know, kind of like, what do I want to do next? I knew I didn't want to just be, you know, kind of working as a software engineer.

I wanted to go back to school. And the question was, like, what area should I study? So, really computer science. I really liked philosophy. And one of the things that I started to think about was cognitive science, you know, just sort of how the mind works. So, with AI, you know, you're trying to program a computer that can almost like think like a human that can perceive the world that can understand it somehow.

“And then in philosophy, you're really thinking through language and, you know, by writing arguments thinking about, you know, how does the human mind work?”

How does it contend with, you know, reality things like this? But the piece that I was missing was actual neurobiological, right? Like the, the human nervous system, the substrate of, of the mind. And so, I decided that before I went back and entered into a graduate program, I needed to learn more about neuroscience. And so, I managed to get a job at Duke University in a neurobiology lab studying human perception. So, I worked as an engineer for about a year and then I went to Duke and I worked there for two years. And this was really, it wasn't a graduate program. It was just working in a neurobiology lab.

And I was auditing courses on neuroscience and neurobiology. Well, it was there trying to learn, you know, how does, how does the mind work? I mean, how, wow, how the human mind perceives the world. Yeah. How, I mean, did you did that? Is that helpful in what you do today? It is. It's, it's pretty interesting. So, the lab that I was working in was really focused on trying to understand how humans perceive the world.

So, there's, for each of your eyes, there's a 2D projection of light from the room. And the question is, how do you go from that like 2D projection on that 2D image to understanding what's actually out in the world? Like the 3D environment, the surface reflectance, you know, properties of things like the wall or, you know, the carpenter or whatever.

“How, how do you sort of solve that problem? And it's called the inverse optics problem. So, it's the notion that you have a 2D image and you're trying to kind of understand this complex 3D world.”

And the challenge is that there's actually not an easy solution to this because you're moving from essentially like 3 dimensions to 2 dimensions, information is lost.

And so, another way to think about this is that an infinite number of different worlds could have produced the same visual image on your retina. And this manifests itself through illusions. So, there's certain types of illusions, or something, for example, called an aims room, where, when you look at the room, it looks like a rectangular room. But in fact, it has, you know, this kind of crazy shape, you know, something you can, you can look up maybe later. But the, the, the interesting thing about that is just the fact that something that appears to you to be, you know, like a normal rectangular room is actually something completely different.

“So, that is just an example of, of one of these optical illusions. Now, the interesting thing about illusions is that they basically, everything you see in some ways is an illusion, right?”

So, they're not outliers. It's not like every once in a while your mind makes a mistake and you kind of see the world incorrectly. You are always inferring some world that is not quite what is actually out there. It's the rule, not the exception. And so, this is, this is, it forms a, almost a philosophical problem. It's like, if you are looking at the world, but you can't actually infer what generated, you know, the images that you see, how do you even, you know, how do you even interact with it? How do you, how do you continue to exist if you're not seeing things properly?

And so, you know, the conclusion, one of the conclusions that we came to was that really the way that you see the world is whatever way is necessary to allow you to continue to persist.

So, we kind of think about this as like, you see the world in an evolutionarily sort of appropriate way in a way which informs your actions so that you kind of do the right things you continue to exist. You can ultimately reproduce and continue on. And so, there's just one of the problems that we wrestled with. Now, what does that mean? It means that your perception of the world is really shaped through experience. It's perceived in the world in the best possible way for you to take actions. And some of these fundamental ideas actually carried through into the work I did in graduate school and even some of the things that we do today with the systems that we build, the robotic systems that we built.

Very interesting, you know, wow.

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So what do we go from here? So, you know, I think like one thing, one of the, you know, when you think about building a robotic system, one of the ways that you can do this, you know,

“when you think about building a robotic system, one of the ways that we kind of think about this is that when you're perceiving the environment, you're not just measuring it.”

You're taking the context and your prior experience and you're using that to predict what you think like the world actually is. So for example, if you look out at a set of trees, you're not just measuring that there's, you know, some obstacles out there in front of you, you're also predicting that there's free space behind them that you can potentially move through. And you get to that point by essentially seeing lots of trees like in your past, right? Like you use that prior experience and then you can understand when you see a pattern like this that actually means that there's, you know, sort of space out there.

Find those trees that you can then leverage in order to make decisions faster to move more aggressively. That's really a machine learning way of thinking about things using lots of data, lots of experience to understand what you're seeing in a functional way. To move, you know, use that in order to move a robot more quickly or more aggressively. And those notions, you know, sort of led me from from neurobiology at Duke, like really kind of thinking about data and machine learning as fundamentally, you know, interesting things towards my my graduate education, which I pursued after that at Carnegie Mellon University.

Wow, but I'm not heard everybody talk about that that's got into the machine learning AI stuff that's pretty fascinating.

“Yeah, and I think like another thing which is is pretty interesting here that I'll also highlight, you know, I was originally went to Duke to try to understand the brain and how it works.”

And my hope was that by understanding that that would help me to maybe better understand, you know, artificial intelligence or how to build machines and things like this.

What I pretty quickly realized was that you neuroscience is really hard, right? People have been studying the human brain for almost 300 years and progress is slow. It's very difficult to understand how the brain works. We don't have a great grasp of it even now. We can describe a lot about it, but not really understand it functionally. And so, one of the lessons from that was that, you know, I almost came away with with the opposite conclusion. Instead of thinking about the brain is something that would help me to build better machines or understand, you know, build a better AI. I almost think that focusing on artificial intelligence and mathematics and probability and statistics and information theory and robotics helps to provide a framework that people may ultimately understand like the brain through.

It almost works the other way that you have to really understand kind of core principles of perception, planning, control like these areas, which are fundamental in AI and robotics to understand ultimately, you know, what the nervous system might be doing and and be able to describe it.

“Wow. Wow. So, you worked at what's in the video too, as well, didn't you?”

That's right. Yeah. So, I, before starting over land AI, I worked for about five years at, at Nvidia. And this is, was a professor. So, after Carnegie Mellon, I got my PhD there in machine learning. I worked on robotics problems. And then I, I was a professor at Georgia Tech for, for five years in the University of Washington for for seven years after that. And one of the things which is really cool about being a faculty member, a professor who is running a research lab is that you can also work in industry. So, I had a research lab, which was focused on robotics and machine learning and I had a number of PhD students who are working in that lab.

It was awesome. I mean, I think, you know, I joined around 2018. So, as before Nvidia was really kind of like a tier tier one, let's say tech company. I think like Google and Microsoft were really up there sort of defining state of the art.

“But when I went to Nvidia, I think there were a lot of good people that they were hiring and people had recently seen the power of GPUs, right? Like this massive parallel processing.”

And I was thinking about that in the context of robotics. How can you parallelize tasks? How can you use it? Not just the sorts of chips in this type of technology, not just for perceiving the environment, but also controlling vehicles. So, an example of this actually, you know, is carried through from work that I was doing at originally Georgia Tech and then Nvidia now to overland where when that vehicle is out in terrain. So when our uncrewed vehicles are out there and looking at terrain, they're evaluating tens of thousands of possible trajectories that they might take.

Looking, ranking each one of them determining, like, is this a good one or a bad one and then choosing how to how to drive after doing that. It's doing that about 10 times a second.

And so, how do you get that to work? Well, you can use Nvidia GPUs to parallelize, you know, these tasks and evaluate many trajectories simultaneously and then decide how you're going to move based on that. Very, very interesting. Do you still do you miss being a professor? Well, yeah, I'm currently, I've got a 5% appointment at the University of Washington, which means that I'm there, you know, every couple weeks working with students.

“You know, I, I like teaching, I like interacting with students. I think that's, that's one of the great benefits of being a professor is is, you know, just engaging with students and people who want to learn.”

So, it's that part's fantastic and I miss doing that. I haven't been teaching recently since I've been spun off the company, but I think working in industry also allows you to really scale your ideas more. So, you know, there's only so much you can do in a smaller research lab.

Yeah. And so, in 2018, the Army Research Laboratory spotted you at an IEEE conference, demoing machine learning. What is an IEEE?

So, IEEE, so it's, it's association for electrical engineers, but it's one of the major types of conferences that that folks publish in.

“So, you know, when you're a professor, one of your main goals is to publish papers, right? And those scientific papers further human knowledge.”

And so, in computer science, the way that you do this is you publish papers at a lot of conferences.

You work with, with your graduate student, you develop a new technology, you then tell the world about it, right? You publish it in a paper and you do this on a pretty pretty, you know, fast iterative basis. You know, that's, you know, one of the major conferences in robotics and we had, you know, had some work there. And, you know, some folks in the Army were seeing what we were doing and had some cool ideas of how we could. Potentially take that fundamental research and start to apply it to Army problems.

Okay, so I was, you know, originally working at Georgia Tech and doing some work on ground vehicle autonomy. So, the way that this started out, we took one fifth scale vehicle. So, these kind of smaller remote control vehicles. We put computers and sensors on them and made them autonomous. And we were trying to race them as fast as possible. So, we were using data that we were collecting while we were driving these cars to learn a, what's called a policy, you think about it is like, you know, AI essentially like for the vehicle that could perceive the world and try to drive really quickly.

And these vehicles are doing things like drifting around turns and things like this. So, they learn to do this, which is one of the things which is cool. Like the vehicles out there, it's trying to drive faster and faster and then it's learning how to do things like drift in order to drive even faster.

And that was, is it actually learning or you programming that into it? So, it's actually learning. So, you start by bootstrapping it. Like you have a human demonstrate, you know, this is how the vehicle should should drive.

“And then it tries to replicate what the human does. And as it does that, sometimes it makes mistakes, sometimes it does well, but it's kind of grading itself.”

And then it will start to experiment. Like if I, you know, accelerate a little bit here or I break a little bit there, does this make me, you know, faster or slower.

And as it does that, it learns how to drive faster and faster and it learns on its own. And so, you're programming in the ability to learn, but then it's looking at its own behavior, learning from that and driving, you know, figuring out how to drive faster. Now, is this like on a track? Yeah, sounds like exactly. Yeah. So, we started out by driving on a sand track.

“And we were able to achieve these like really fast lap times where the vehicles, you know, basically drifting through turns and things like that.”

And so, when I started to work with the Army, the question was, can you take these fundamental principles and apply them to larger vehicles and figure out how to drive aggressively through all sorts of different terrain.

So, not just on tracks, but, you know, through forests and deserts and beaches and things like this.

So, excuse me, what I was going to ask is, I mean, if this, if, okay, if we have a race car, it's going around a track over and over again, and it is learning.

“You switch up the track. Well, I mean, will it be able to take what it learned on track A and apply it to track B immediately or will it, do you understand?”

Yeah, I would say it is how to go from a track to high speed chase in the middle of, I don't know, band hat.

It's kind of like a fundamental challenge in machine learning. Like if you learn, for example, how to drive really fast on a oval track where you're always going in one direction, right, you'll learn how to drive really fast will always turning left essentially, let's say. But then if you go on another track, which has right turns, will it be able to generalize and, you know, be able to perform well on a track like that. And the short answer is, you know, not without some sort of work. So, generally speaking, you want to collect data in a wide variety of environments that are inclusive of the types of places that you might want to be driving in the future.

So, for example, you might have a complex dirt track with left and right turns and some wider turns and some sharper turns and things like this. If you train on a track like that, it's very easy to then race on like an oval track, right, because you've seen all of the things that you're likely to see. So, that becomes easy. But if you, for example, train on a dirt track and now you have to drive on asphalt, you may not be able to do that super well. And so, you need to collect new data as you move to that new type of environment or new type of problem.

Incorporate that into, you know, your learning algorithm and then it will, you know, start to do better on that new type of track. And that matters, you know, even now when we think about where we want to drive our vehicles, because if you only train, for example, in the desert, you're not going to be able to necessarily drive well through a forest or vice versa. And so, you want to really train these systems, have them collect data and learn from as wide a set of environments as possible, so that they're able when they encounter a new environment to still perform well, that there'll still be aspects of that environment that they've seen before.

So, so we, I guess, what my question is will it get to the point where it runs the route for the very first time, like a brand new route for a very first time, it could be, yeah, it could be off road, it could be sure in the middle of a city, but we're talking left turns right turns heavy breaking fast acceleration drifting. All of that stuff will eventually learn what it needs to learn to be able to have a complicated new route run at the first time and it will run it perfectly, it will go as fast as is the machine is capable of.

It's certainly possible and like that's what we're always striving for, so when we're putting, you know, ungroup ground vehicle autonomous vehicles in new environments, they're already performing really well, because it's seen many aspects of that before, and you're trying to get it to perform, you know, optimally, right, like that is the goal, like potentially faster than a human driver, even on environments that it's never seen before.

And they're constantly learning, so the more environments that we encounter, the more data we get, like the better and better the system gets, and the goal is always kind of moving towards that optimal movement.

How close are you to that goal?

“Depends depends on the environment, I mean, I think we can, we can already drive faster than humans in some environments, so yeah, it's, it's pretty cool.”

Very interesting. And so, how long have you just been at DARPA? So, yeah, so I started work with Army Research Lab, you know, again, around like 2018, and in 2019 or so, I started to talk with folks at DARPA, they were really interested in developing, essentially rebooting ground autonomy for defense.

So, like here's, here's what the situation was, DARPA back in 2004 and 2005 has something called the Grand Challenges, or Grand Challenges.

So these were challenges where they were trying to incept ground autonomy. So this actually goes back to the, um, NDA in, in 2001. This is basically where Congress decided in 2001, they were like, um, by 2015, we want a third of all military ground vehicles to be autonomous. So I think about this, you know, over 25 years ago. The problem was, no one knew how to do that. Like, there weren't, it wasn't like there were autonomous vehicles, you know, driving all over the place, and that's, this would be easy.

No one knew how to make these vehicles autonomous.

“Well, I, I think, you know, there had been, you know, work in robotics where people were moving vehicles in simpler environments, autonomously, and so that the, the notion was like, well, what if we could do this on the battlefield, right?”

What if we could do it in these more complex environments? If you could take the warfighter out of the vehicle, you can imagine, you know, that not just provide safety, but potentially, you know, tactical things that you can do. We can, we can maybe talk about that in a little bit. But in order to make those, those vehicles autonomous, you needed to know how to do it, right? And they didn't. And so DARPA, one of the things that's great about DARPA is that it is an organization that is designed to just like create new things, right?

We have some crazy challenge DARPA is out there and can create a program, pull together some of the best minds in the U.S. to focus, like really focus on it for, you know, up to about four years, and try to solve a problem. And so in in 2004 in 2005, they came up with a DARPA grand challenge where they were trying to race vehicles from, you know, bar store, California to Prim Nevada, is about 135 miles on dirt roads. And they just laid down a challenge, just said, like, if you can do this, you get prize money. And all sorts of teams came together to attack this problem.

So there were university teams from places like Carnegie Mellon and Stanford and MIT and so on. And there were industry teams, like Ashkosh, you know, how to team. And there were just people who were trying to put together autonomous vehicles in their garage, like just build robots.

“And they went out there and raced. And in the first in 2004, the first challenge, no one made it beyond seven miles, like that was the, you know, so it was, you see, I'm used vehicle, I think, made it that far, it got stuck, caught fire.”

It was like a whole thing. The next year, though, in 2005, I think five teams competed this challenge. They made it the entire 134 miles. Those teams, like the folks from those teams, after that challenge was over. There were a few other ones. There's something called the Urban Challenge and some other DARPA programs, which followed, followed up on this. But many of those people then moved into industry and started the self-driving car projects and companies that then turned into things, you know, companies like Waymo or Aurora innovation and so on.

So these autonomous driving companies, you know, commercial companies. So by, you know, 2012, let's say a lot of work was being done in the commercial sector, bootstrapped off of this DARPA work, right? So the military, you know, started this whole thing because they wanted autonomous vehicles. People started to build autonomous vehicles because of this DARPA program.

So by, like, 2019, coming back to my story, DARPA was in a position where they were like, well, cool. We have autonomous taxis. You know, there's been a lot of progress in this area.

But, you know, where's our autonomous tanks, right? Like, where are our autonomous military vehicles? The old point of this was initially to support the military. And so DARPA racer was a program that got stood up. It started in 2021 to reboot autonomy for defense. So specifically to take a lot of the learnings that had been produced over the previous, you know, 20 years or so for the on-road autonomous driving industry and, you know,

work which had been done in robotic perception and, you know, robotic vehicle control, bring that back together and focus on defense problems.

And so that meant trying to drive much faster, you know, larger and faster vehicles off-road, what we call complex natural terrain. So, you know, no roads at all right, like, through deserts, through forests, through snow, things like this. And contested terrain. So thinking about, you know, how do you move when you not only do not have infrastructure, which is there to help you, like roads or road networks or signs or things like this, but infrastructure, which might be in the environment, which is there to defeat you, to stop you.

“And so that's what the DARPA racer program was. So I had already been doing work at, you know, Georgia Tech and then University of Washington, working with the Army on developing off-road ground vehicle autonomy.”

And I then put together a team, it's called a performer team, to attack these problems for the military through DARPA starting in 2021.

So they recruit you from the IEEE conference. So the way that that worked was, like, through the research I was doing in the publications that was, you know, putting out to the world. Army saw that the technology that we were, Army research lab saw that the technology we were developing might be really helpful for the types of problems they wanted to solve. I then started working with Army. So the way that that works is when you're running a university research lab, you have a bunch of PhD students, you know, they're doing research, you're publishing it, you're making it publicly available for other scientists to see.

But you need funding to run that lab. And so people pay you to essentially do research. They pay your lab to do research. So Army, US Army was one of the organizations that I started to fund my research. And when you fund research, you can say, okay, here are the problems we want you to solve. We'll give you, you know, this much money to solve them with your PhD students. And then you provide those solutions back to to the Army.

“So that's what I was doing when I was working at Georgia Tech in University of Washington was my lab was partially funded by the US Army. Then I worked on problems that were interesting to them.”

We provided those solutions back to the Army. And then we started to work with DARPA, which is at the time Department of Defense, but Department of War, like level organization. They saw the work we were doing with the US Army. And then they decided to fund my lab at like a much higher level to like attack these problems of how do you drive vehicles off-road and all sorts of different types of terrain at high speeds. Wow, so you've been, yeah, you've really been at the cutting edge of this thing, the entire time.

Yeah, so we've been working on these problems for, you know, more than more than 10 years, more than a decade. And my lab was doing a lot of that work in academia, you know, before we spun out over land. Wow, wow, well, before we get into over land, let's take a quick break. There's been a lot of attention lately on how important sleep is, not just for recovery, but for your brain hormones, immune system, and for your performance.

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You'll also unlock exclusive range day videos behind the scenes content in premium ambience videos that you're not going to find anywhere else. Join the Patreon community today and get access to the full experience. Alright, let's talk about the TechStron M5. Sure, yeah, so as part of the DARPA Racer program, so this is DARPA program where we're trying to develop ground vehicle autonomy for the military. We started out working with Polaris Racer side-by-side, so these are very capable vehicles that can go very fast.

They've got four wheels, about 3,000 pounds, about the size of a small SUV, something like this. And, you know, in the first part of the DARPA Racer program, we were just, there were multiple teams and we were essentially like racing these Polaris Racer, so trying to record the best possible times through a wide variety of different terrains and, you know, tests scenarios. As we progressed through the program, you know, the DARPA program manager didn't want us to just be using those small vehicles, so we moved up to the TechStron M5.

The TechStron M5 is basically a robotic combat vehicle prototype.

It's about 12 tons, so it is much larger. I went from a side-by-side to a 12-ton vehicle. Yeah, it's a 12-ton track vehicle. So it's about the size of a 1-1-3, so it looks like a tank, like a sort of like a small tank, I guess, but pretty heavy vehicle tracked is electric, so really aggressive. It has the ability to essentially go from, you know, zero to 60, like super think about like a Tesla, but like, you know, like a tank version of that. So really, really awesome vehicle to work with. And we're putting autonomy on that vehicle and then driving that through off-road terrain.

Yeah, how did that? And this was a competition, correct? Yeah, so DARPA racer, it started out with three teams. So it was our team and there were two other teams that we were competing against.

By the first summer, about a year into the, into the program, you know, we had by far the best technology and pretty quickly the other teams essentially dropped out and we were the only ones left.

We were focused on not only driving on the side by sides, but also the much larger vehicle. So we were the only team that actually worked with with these. And there aren't that many of them. There's something like, you know, four or five, text on M5s ever produced. But, you know, we had all of them and we were just like smashing through terrain and these huge tracked vehicles pretty awesome.

“And so what is, what is the kind of the point of the competition? Do they buy the technology from you or, or did they fund you?”

That's a great question. So how does it work? Yeah, like, this is, this is a really good question actually because the way that DARPA normally works, you know, they have these programs where they're trying to develop new technology. In this case, develop round vehicle autonomy for the US military, so for our soldiers and Marines.

How do you actually do that? It's a good question and very few people succeed. So this is known as like transition, transitioning like a new capability that's developed from DARPA to the actual warfighter.

“It's something like 4% of technology's ever actually get transitioned. So just because you succeed in developing a new capability doesn't mean that the warfighter gets that capability.”

This is actually why we created Overland AI. We were like in this program and we had this new capability and we're just like, this is incredible.

We can, you know, drive extremely fast off road. We can do it in a variety of different types of vehicles. We have the thing that DARPA was, you know, wanted us to produce, like we actually did it. Now, how can the warfighter benefit? And so we felt that the most, the most promising way of making that transition was to spin off a company that would then take the capability that we developed as part of this DARPA program.

Commercialize it. So turn it into, you know, robust, reliable, commercial autonomy stack and then sell that back to the Army and Marine Corps so that they could use it on their programs.

“So on their vehicles and so that warfighting units could start to work with this technology and start to integrate it into into tactics. So that's why we created Overland AI.”

We thought, Darmet, like, this is just going to disappear if we don't do this.

So why would they fund the, did they fund the research?

Yeah, so DARPA funded all of this, like they did to develop the capability, but just because Darmet just shelf it. So then what has to happen is like the Army and the Marine Corps or whoever, like one of the services, has to then put up money to be able to then, like buy and transition. That technology because from DARPA or from so, yeah, so the way that DARPA works is that DARPA, like these DARPA programs are generally four years long. They have a time limit. So, and that's part of the point, like it gives you a very focused window in time to just do whatever it takes to try to develop this new technology.

“But at the end of those four years, that program is over and you have to find someone who is then going to support the continuation of that technology, you know, to move it into warfighting units.”

So like, you've created it. Now someone has to continue to like transfer it to like get it on to military vehicles to push it into, into units. And that's where a lot of these programs die because you like create the technology, but you can't. That no one picks it up like when it's over. I would think there would be, so this is, what would you call this like a incubator, like you get you get you get picked to get funding to be an incubator. And then DARPA doesn't even, they don't own the actual, well, they do, they, they own the IP. So also on the IP.

Yeah, so the way that this works is like when when so DARPA pays for the development of, you know, this core technology. In this case, I'm running a lab at the University of Washington. So they pay the University of Washington to develop the IP. When they do that, that IP belongs to both DARPA and the University of Washington, right, because, you know, DARPA pays for a university to develop it, you know, they're both, both parties essentially own that IP. But once you have that IP, in this case, it is like raw technology, right, like it is research grade code that, that can demonstrate this capability, that will allow a vehicle to drive fast, but it's not going to be reliable in the same way that, you know, like a waymo is where you have a whole team of engineers that is making production quality code.

So they own that, like they own the basic capability and they own that IP, but that then has to be taken and turned into essentially a commercial production ready piece of software.

Or these class of, I mean, I would just are these class of, I would think there would be venture capital firms galore just surrounding these projects.

“Well, yeah, yeah, so so sometimes, yes, right, only 4% make it to the warfighter.”

Yeah, so, but but in some sense, that's actually what happened here, right, because we said, okay, like we're going to take this IP, we're going to we license it, right, so that IP is licensed to overland the eye, we created this company to essentially take that IP and then turn it into a commercial autonomy stack that, you know, is reliable and we keep building on it, we keep improving it.

And then we can transition that back to the to the warfighter. So overland AI got it start by focusing on the software portion of this, right, take these good ideas that were developed during DARPA.

So, you know, we license that IP at overland, we build on top of it, we turned it into a commercial autonomy stack and now we have this software that you can put on to a vehicle to make that vehicle autonomous. With, you know, different types of vehicles, we discussed like the side by side or like, you know, the big text drawn M5, though we can make autonomous, you know, we really want to develop software, which will work on any vehicle that the military had. And so overland was stood up to do that and to your point about VCs, you know, where a VC backed company, right, so there essentially making that bet that you're saying it's like, okay, we can step in, provide additional funding.

To turn this into a mature product, that can then be transitioned over to the warfighter. But now you're in like defense tech territory, right, where you now have to fight all of these battles to go from, you know, this good core idea, good core IP to actually getting it procured, right, and that that takes, you know, time and effort. And, and so like our story as as a defense tech company is is really similar to a lot of other stories except that we got this start by, you know, doing all of this, you know, sort of initial research to accept a new technology that the military really wanted.

Very interesting, right, and so you so the DARPA competition ends, you win and yeah. So only information was even develop overland AI. Right, so we, we started overland AI and, you know, we, overland actually was formed before the DARPA competition completed, so we became part of the competition as well. And we then as the competition was was going on, you know, we were developing new technology from moving like really quickly through a lot of different biomes, so different types of environments. And then we were really trying to think and this is overland AI started in in 20, like December 2022.

So three and a half years ago. And we were initially focused on, okay, we have this software, we're, you know, refining it, we're turning into a commercial piece of software.

How do you then get traction with like the army and marine core, not just DARPA, but like, you know, the people who ultimately need to use this technology.

“And the problem was that even though we had this, like, great piece of software, it has to go on a vehicle. So it's like, what vehicle are we going to put it on?”

And we started to talk to companies and units that had vehicles, which could be made autonomous, but there just weren't that many of them out there. We had something which could be very effective, but we didn't have vehicles to put it on. So we started out, you know, again, with a software stack, but we quickly realized that we had to actually also build the hardware, so that we could get this idea of autonomous vehicles into the hands of warfighters faster, like, so we just started to build the vehicles to.

“And that's, that's what resulted in, like, this ultra vehicle that, you know, you've seen, seen outside where, you know, this is an autonomous vehicle that we built.”

And we put our software on so that we could start to put many different types of payloads, you know, on the vehicles and start to work with warfighting units to really integrate autonomous systems into their concepts of operation.

That then we worked with a defense innovation unit and got a prototype contract with them. We then started to work with Army applications lab and, you know, winning, you know, these servers, these small contracts with the Marine Corps and the Army. We're doing really well with those. And, you know, we then last year we revealed like the ultra vehicle fully autonomous, you know, vertically integrated vehicle that you could push into hands of warfighters. We started to push this technology into units who were constantly testing them and then this led to a production contract.

So we just recently won first production contract for autonomous ground vehicles in the US military and that's with the Marine Corps.

“So it's really this, this whole process of, and it didn't take that long, right?”

It's about three, three and a half years where we went from like university lab or in the through prototype, fielding with warfighters production contract. Wow, so we felt like we had here. Yeah, yeah. Wow. I mean, so who won the contract or who, who, who, who are you contracted to? Yeah, with with with with with with the Marine Corps. So the Marine Corps is buying a whole set of the autonomous vehicles that that we produce.

It's part of their ground-based air defense program and so they'll initially start using those vehicles for autonomous resupply.

So basically air defense systems, so trying to make sure that they get, you know, enough ammunition as they're shooting down drones.

Can I ask how many you're going to manufacture form? Yeah, so we're, we're manufacturing, you know, the first tranche about 15 of these, you know, the next year or so.

“So that's, that's what we're starting out with.”

And one of the things which is, you know, pretty interesting about these vehicles, they're modular. So a lot of units want to start using them for resupply where they're just kind of putting supplies on them and moving the supplies back and forth. But we've been doing a lot of work with with other units, like 80 second airborne, 170 third airborne. Other workfighting units to put other types of payloads on board the platforms as well.

And so one of the things that we've been talking to marines about is putting sensors and, you know, effectors, so basically kinetic counter UAS payloads on the vehicles.

And thinking about how to disaggregate them. So one of the things, one of the ways that you can use autonomous vehicles is by, you know, essentially putting your sensors and putting your. Your counter UAS for example, payloads on vehicles and moving them away from the places that you're trying to defend, right? So you're disaggregating, you're dispersing your essentially making it much harder for an adversary to be able to. Take everything else that like all of the pieces out when you're when you're defending an area.

Interesting. So they're going to be using this for logistics. You're going to be using this for defense. Yeah. Would imagine there's going to be an offensive commodant. Yeah. Yeah. So the way that we're thinking about this is. So logistics. So you can think about resupply and casualty evacuation. A lot of people when they think about autonomous vehicles, this is like the first thing which comes to mind because they think about a vehicle.

And they're like, oh, okay, like I can put stuff in it and I can move it, right? Like that's like what a vehicle does. But I like to think about these vehicles more like robotic systems. They can sense, they can track, they can move on their own on the battlefield.

“And I think like the real product market fit here is that you want to move these vehicles out in front of the war fighters, right?”

So you want to be using them for things like intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance. Being able to move them through, you know, bad weather. They can consistently, you know, stay in a location for a long period of time because they're just on the ground. So they might be more effective than drones for for some of these things. You can use them for, you know, defense or strike capabilities. So you can put kinetic payloads on them. You can put drones on them.

And launch them off of of the vehicles. So you can, you know, move them into areas that might be too risky for a human, but they can potentially hold ground or try to take terrain in those areas. Breaching is a major thing that we're working on, so we're working with a number of different combat engineering units on.

And then air defense, as I was discussing, is essentially putting sensors and shooters in different locations and moving them autonomously, reconfiguring what that defensive position might look like.

I mean, I could think of a whole slew of things, but let's, let's run out back and take a look at this. Yeah, sounds great. You guys know my schedule. I'm in the studio all day. I'm on the road, and I've got kids. The last thing I have time for is standing around a gym wondering what to do next.

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All right, we're out here with Byron Boots CEO and founder of Overland AI.

“You're ready to take a look at this beast here. What are we looking at?”

So this is an ultra one of our autonomous vehicles. So let me just kind of show you what it is. You can tell it's an off-road vehicle. It's got long travel suspension and big wheels. But it's fully autonomous. So it has sensors up in the front of the vehicle. There's stereo cameras. There's actually three of them. Like one here, one on the other side, light R. So this allows it to see in this whole area in front of the vehicle.

Now what degree? So it actually can see 360 degrees around it. So like you have these sensors in the front, there's also sensors in the back so it can just kind of see this whole whole area. And then if you come along this way, this is a payload deck so you can put a wide variety of payloads on it. You can see there's all these attachment points so it makes it easy to integrate new payloads onto the vehicle. Below this deck, you have compute. So that's where your computer systems are, your power batteries.

The alternator like all this is below the deck. And then back here, you've got comms. So satellite comms. We can integrate tactical mesh comms as well on the vehicle. Walking around, back here, you can see there's more sensors. So stereo cameras and light R again.

What is the light R do? So light R basically allows you to see depth in the area around the robot.

So I'm thinking about it as like a depth sensor. It tells you the distance to surfaces in the terrain.

“Okay. Yeah. What would an engine already run in the air? I think it's, it's, you have to ask child.”

It's about about 115 horsepower engine. So this is based. This whole vehicle is actually based on a Polaris. It's like a laser commercial side by side. Okay. Okay. So the engine, drivetrain, chassis that all comes from Polaris. We take out the seats from the vehicle. Take off the roll cage and everything. And then transform it into this autonomous platform. Right on. And so what kind of stuff would you be mounting of here? So you can put, yeah. You can put all sorts of different payloads on here. This particular vehicle takes about a thousand pounds of payloads and pounds.

So we've done everything from, you know, fairly straightforward things like comms, making a communication node to electronic warfare payloads to remote weapon stations. So you can mount, you know, machine gun on on the vehicle. So if you mount a weapon system on here that I'll run through autonomous, autonomous stack, as I would you call it. So the autonomous stack controls the vehicle. It allows an operator to tell, essentially tell the vehicle where they want the vehicle to go.

And then they will access the payload through the comms network. So the human is still in the loop whenever you're using the payload.

But the movement of these types of vehicles is autonomous. And what that allows you to do is, instead of having to just like remote control the vehicle, essentially, you know, drive it through its sensors, the human can just say, I want one vehicle to go to list location and I want two vehicles to go to this location and so on. So it really allows for force multiplication where a single operator can control many different platforms and then access the payloads on those platforms. And we'll show you how to do that. It's like the old computer games like Warcraft is exactly like that. So like that's actually how go here, how we think about it.

“Killed this thing, you know, I think like our vision of this is a single operator could control potentially hundreds of different assets on the battlefield.”

And you're going to do that through an interface, which is a little bit like a real time strategy game like Warcraft or Starcraft, where, you know, it allows you to, you know, select the units, tell them where to go, execute the payloads.

And so on. Wow. So I just, I mean, with with with the changing landscape or the battlefield now, there's a first land with autonomous land vehicle I've seen.

Yeah, so you can mount like an apparatus. Yeah, you weapon on the thing. Yep. Well, so let's say, I mean, and girls got their stuff coming out, shield AI's got that new X battery, they came out with. You can count on you. So what I'm asking is, I don't know if we're there, maybe we're already there on this as old news, but yeah, with all these companies, you know, like yours, the submarines, the the seronic, you know,

“you know, overland AI, when we do go to a full scale war, yeah, are you going to be like, is the operator or the battle or the ground force commander or just the commander of the entire operation?”

Are they going to be controlling shield AI's X bats, overland AI's ground vehicles, seronics, surface warfare vehicles, submarines, drones, all of it. All of it, all of it on the same. So no matter is working on this right now, finding ways to integrate all of these different pieces into the same sort of system, so that you have a unified view of the battlefield. Now the way that that may play out, I think you're likely to see, there are single systems where you can see all of the different pieces, and then there will likely be systems which will allow the war fighters to actually be controlling some subset of them on the battlefield, but all have to be linked together to provide that overall awareness of what you're pushing out there.

So if you have a hundred, two hundred of these things right here, what is the name of this? This is an ultra, the ultra, yeah. Hundred, two hundred, three hundred ultra is out here, and they've got, you know, surface to air missiles, for air defense, they've got, I don't know, 50 calibers for other ground vehicles and anti personnel and rocket launchers and gaid launchers and drones, are they all going to read off each other or somebody going to have to.

“So what the way that this is is going, we're taking, so the basic idea is that you start with just being able to move like one vehicle at a time, right?”

So you can say, I want this vehicle to go to this location, you just let it go, you know, execute a payload there. We're already can do that really well, so now we're starting to build up coordination where you can move multiple vehicles at once and they coordinate in order to achieve a task, and then we'll keep building on that. So the basic idea is that, you know, over, like as we build out the technology and as we feel more and more of it, you're going to have a situation where a single operator will be able to move multiple vehicles into formations, have them,

send them to achieve a particular task, and they're going to go out there and just do it, and that's part of what's called mission autonomy or orchestration.

So platform autonomy is basically the autonomy that lives on the vehicle that allows it to see the terrain, see where, you know, vehicles and people are out in that terrain and move through it.

And you tie that together where vehicles are coordinating with each other, and that's mission autonomy, they're coordinating autonomously to actually conduct like a full mission.

Wow.

“I've got a million questions for you, but it's how to shit out here in humans.”

Yeah, let's see, let's see, we'll do that inside.

That sounds great, but let's see what this thing can do. Do you want to drive it? Yep. Yes, I want to drive it. Okay, so the upper part of this interface here, this is where the vehicle is on a satellite map.

You can see the name of the vehicle, and then down here gives you a view of what the vehicle sees. So over here, this is the front camera. On the vehicle, and then this is actually like the AI view of the vehicle, you know, have to necessarily spend too much attention, like looking at this, but the magenta areas are lethal. So those are areas that you know, the vehicle, you don't want to move the vehicle into, but as you're as you're teleoperating it, you can actually move it anywhere that you want.

So this is that big pond that we're digging down there. This is, this is going to be about 50 meters around, so it's only seeing up here on this little area.

“What we can do is give you the controller and the way that this works is when you pull, like you have to pull this down, so your lower left, okay?”

You hit A, and that moves you into autonomy, and then you can move this joystick moves full of the vehicle forward. Holy shit.

So that's basically moving forward, and then you can turn using this so we can turn it to the right.

And, you know, when the vehicle is here in front of you, it's tempting to look at the vehicle, but you actually look at this, which is what the vehicle can see. And then you can control it. That's right. Yeah, and you can control it beyond line of sight, so you can do this from like 5000 miles away. Wow.

So left down, and then we're going forward. It is, it's weird not looking at the vehicle. Yeah, I want to look over there, so. Holy shit.

Can I go, how do you go backwards?

Okay, so to go backwards, hold down this, control, so both that and this, and then that, and then move that backwards. There you go. Oh, there we are. It will automatically stop, but won't run us over. Let's not test it.

All right, yes. Yeah, there it is, slowing for person. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's not going to work in war, Byron. You can, you can turn that off.

Dude, this is crazy. So would somebody be looking at this or like a VR headset or does it, I guess you can probably do no matter. You can do whatever. Like generally, you're looking at this. You can look through the other sensors on board the vehicle as well.

So you can, you know, look at the rear sensors or off to the sides. You can access the, the payloads on, on the vehicle, through the interface up here. Wow. All right, and then if you want to, well, oh, shit. There's a tree.

Yeah, maybe back up. Okay, so you can't tell a amount of gamer. I'm not great at that either, but we like to control it actually through this interface. And I'll show you that in a moment.

“I think one of the challenges for teleoperation is that you don't have like a vehicle sense, right?”

Like you can't feel like other vehicles moving, like you would when you're driving. And now you're trying to interpret what the vehicle can see through its own sensors. It should probably stop. Right.

What, it's, it's actually much safer to put it into autonomy and just tell it where you wanted to go.

“And it will find a way to get there without, you know, hitting anything.”

And we do that while staying safe. Yes. Try that. I can do that. That's awesome.

All right. So shit. I did almost hit that damn tree. Okay. It's centered to go get a pizza.

That sounds great. I'm not sure. I'm not sure though. Let me do this on the road. Can we go over there?

Can we go over here? Yeah. But before you guys run the route, how is that thing determining what is a human being,

“and what's a tree, and what's a vehicle, and what's a rock?”

Yeah. It's looking at the whole environment around it. And then it's determining where I can drive and where I can drive.

So that's the first part.

It's notion of traversability, like what part of the terrain is traversable. And then on top of that, there's a semantic understanding of the train, which means, you can understand that, you know, it can see a person or a car. You know, determine what that is, where they are relative to it. And right now, it's running a safety system, which essentially says,

like, don't stop if you get too close to a person or a vehicle. Right on. I mean, how does it different? Does it pick up like body temperature or how does it look? It looks and, so it's just using a camera.

Yeah. And it's saying, like, this looks like a person, this looks like a vehicle. And it's able to pick them out. Cool. Yeah.

“And this is full autonomy, what we're going to do here.”

Yep. Holy shit. Oh, where are we in the way? Let's move back away from it. So, yeah, as it's moving through the train, it's also tracking where all the people are.

Right where the vehicles are, where they are relative to it. And then deciding how to, how to drive. It picked them up. It picked them up. Yeah.

So it can actually pretty wild that it picked them up in the middle of all those weeds and trees and trees. Yep. You can see one of the benefits of this is you can just tell it I want you to go to, again, like this location and you can let it go when it will do its thing.

So I was in the run, basically came up the hill.

You know, went around the field and then stopped there. So, very short run for what it normally does, but you can get a taste of kind of like how it moves. That is sick. All right, well, thanks for showing us what the Ultra can do and let's go wrap up the interview. Yeah, thanks for letting us come out here and show us.

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Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. Okay, so after taking a look at this thing, I, this, this, this just has so many different capabilities. It could be used for so many different things.

I mean, even just keep, I mean, it sounds like the first thing the military's interested in is logistics.

Yeah, I mean, constant detection. Can these things detect?

I mean, when we were up there, it detected, I mean, I know you guys have that safety feature on it. But it detected one of my camera guys who was, I mean, really wasn't even that close to it. Look like he was maybe 25 yards, 30 yards from it in the middle of a bunch of trees and it picked him up like that.

“Could this thing pick up IEDs? Is there a way that you could, that it could detect IEDs?”

Yeah, so you could put a variety of different types of sensors on the vehicle.

So you can certainly detect like people in vehicles and then you can also, you know, we've been putting, to have their drones on these, so you know, the drone can go up in the air, be able to look down on the ground. So if you have, you know, ground penetrating radar, other types of sensors, you can certainly detect things like IEDs or obstacles in the environment that then can be identified and reduced, right?

“So that's certainly something that they can do. And to your point, you know, I think you can, of course, move things around, but just the ability to push these forward and sense the environment is, you know, I think we'll be game changing, right?”

You don't have to put a person out there to do it.

Do you see these integrating with, with human forces that are, you know, do you see these is is a forward observation platform for maybe, you know, a slew of tanks or M-rads or whatever we're using and then kind of, you know, push that information back to the larger force or is it going all autonomous? I think the re-et, so, you know, there's a number of statistics out there, which are pretty interesting, so you've got like Ukrainian ground commanders basically saying that they're going to replace something like 80% of infantry with uncrewed ground vehicles in the near term.

And, you know, those statistics are interesting. I think the reality will be a little bit more subtle. So, these are machines that can integrate with human formations. You should think about them as giving humans more capability on the battlefield. So, I think the way that they'll actually work with US military is that we'll have formations with humans and them. They will be pushing these vehicles out in front as you suggested in order to be able to get a better understanding of the terrain that they're going to be moving into.

But you can use them for all sorts of things, right? So, it's not just sensing what's out there. You can use them to create like diversions, right? Like you can use them, you know, to, you can use them for strike capability. You can use them to create that kind of counter US bubble to protect humans. I think about them as, you know, something that will be like a force multiplier. I mean, you're saying that Ukrainian military saying that it could replace will replace up to 80% of infantry. Yeah, and you're saying the US is saying, well, maybe not the US, but you see a subtle integration. Why won't we do a subtle integration? I mean, I know, and one hand, I'm going to piss the war fighter up because I love fighting war.

It's on the other hand, I'm thinking about my toddlers at home, you know, with all the wars that were involved in and I'm re-involved in and I don't know what my, I don't know my kids going over there having to do it. I get you know, and so why do you see a subtle integration? I wouldn't we go full scale and say, hey, you know, like we, we don't need private Joe driving this, you know, driving this M rap into hostile territory. Why, like, but that's a, that's a, I don't want to say a wasted life, but it could be, it would be a wasted life if you got killed when we have the capability of going full autonomous right now.

“I think we'll eventually get there. So one of the value propositions for like ground autonomy is that you're really focused on the, what, just one of the hardest domains right in the military, right?”

So just kind of stepping back, there are a lot of folks who are focused on, on air power, naval power, missiles, but at the end of the day wars are ultimately one in the ground, you know, that's where people live, right? We don't live in the sea, we don't live in the air, we live on the ground.

focusing on the ground makes a lot of sense because we want to bring technology to the warfighter that will save those lives, right? And so,

yes, we want to take, we want to take humans out of harm's way. And I think, you know, in Ukraine, we're seeing technology, you know, increasingly being pushed out in front of the warfighter, and I think they're very optimistic about how they want to use them.

“And ultimately, we do want to do that, right? We want to, we want to pull, we want to essentially reduce risk on the battlefield, right?”

Pull warfighters away from these points of contact, have more people who are, you know, maybe operating teams of robots from, you know, that are far away from location where they, where they could get hit. But in the meantime, I think that the way they're going to be integrated is in a way that helps warfighters in the ground to stay safer to potentially give them more, more options, more tools without totally pulling them out. So, you know, to your point, like, yes, like, we want to, we want to ensure that, you know,

we ultimately want to pull, you know, as many people have harm's way as possible. But, you know, these are our still machines that aren't, you know, quite as creative and adaptable as humans.

“And so I think it's the, what we're really trying to do is find the places where we can maximize the ability for them to be able to take risk.”

Well, also allowing our humans to do what they do best and, and do maybe more specialized roles on the battlefield. So I think it'll be a process. I mean, just thinking about my time, you know, in Iraq, Afghanistan alone. I mean, I have, right. I, D, though, was was was huge. And then here is a key statistic here. 44% of US killed an action from 2006 to 2021 were killed by I, E, D's, 44%. Now, I mean, if, if, if these things did have, I, D detection capabilities, it's got to be better than humans than I mean, there's 43.

It's almost 50%. Yeah. People that were killed would still be here today. Yeah. You know, just with, just in that application. I think there's a lot you can do there. I mean, there's, you know, sensors you can put on the vehicle. Human sensor, like I would just say it with caught my guy out. Now, we, it's trying to, yeah, in a bunch of trees. I mean, rolling down Iraq. I mean, there were sniper problems. It was the guy, the trigger, the triggermen of LEDs. I mean, I would just, I would think that it would pick them up a media. I mean, you can't, they can't hide from the machine.

Yeah. How is it sensing them? Yeah. So the, the machine has cameras on it, right? And we, depending on the, the load out for it, you have, you can have sort of normal RGB cameras. You can have thermal cameras, right? Like, there's a lot that you can do to detect people and vehicles in the environment. So, I was just using cameras out there. I was able, as you said, just be able to pick someone up even in the, you know, in the woods and in the weeds.

“But, you know, you should think about, like, there's a lot of different ways that these can be used out, again, out in front of the warfighter. You know, you can have convoys of, of autonomous vehicles that don't have people on them, right?”

That can move very quickly and move supplies back and forth. Even if they're targeted, at least no human is being killed. You can have them autonomous vehicles out in front of human convoys as well, right?

So, really making sure that there is no one out there that, you know, moving first through the terrain.

Generally speaking, there's a lot of ideas in the Army and Marine Corps about how to use these vehicles out in front, again, like leading convoys or it's like a protective onion almost right. You can think about a whole set of vehicles that are surrounding higher value assets. So, there are people or, you know, tanks or probably fighting vehicles or, you know, XM30, which is the replacement for that, having autonomous vehicles that can provide sensing and protection for those formations. So, we think about them as adding to some of the things that were, were developing.

Quite quite a few. I mean, I think people are, once they start to see the vehicle and they start to think about it, they are coming up with lots of ways of potentially using them. And as we, you know, one of the things we've been trying to do in the last year is work with a lot of different units, so we've worked with over 20 different different units integrating this technology into the unit. For example, the 80 second airborne.

“We worked with three, eight, two, four, almost six months, just embedded with them up through one of their training rotations down at JRTC in Louisiana. And we started out just doing resupply.”

They were like, this is kind of the obvious use case for this. Let's use this to support our logistics to allow us to move faster.

We were able to do that. And so then they were like, okay, can we get cameras and drones and things like that on it? The answer is yes. And so we started to add different types of payloads to it.

They started to use them in more creative ways. And by the end of this, you know, they were using these autonomous vehicles in, you know, in this for some force exercise. It's not just for resupply, but also for intelligence surveillance reconnaissance. There were snipers who were using the vehicles as decoys, right? Like there's just a lot of things you can start to do. And the first step is really just like getting it in the hands of a warfighter, right? Like let them think about the problems they're trying to solve.

Experience the technology and then, you know, start to iterate on, you know, potentially new tactics and things like this that you can do with the vehicles. Now, are these are these truly autonomous or, is there somebody is an operator in the rear that's going to have to be behind each one of these things with a remote control? Yeah, this is a great question. So, you know, and this is sometimes kind of glossed over a lot of people say that they can do autonomous things. And people think about uncrewed ground vehicles. People talk about UGVs all the time in Ukraine versus autonomous vehicles. So what are the differences between these things, right?

So remote control basically means you have a controller like in your hand and you're looking at the thing and you're driving it. So think about like a toy car, right?

“Like that's, that's a remote control vehicle. Now, that's fine except you have to, you have to actually look at the terrain yourself, look at the vehicle and determine where it's going to go.”

That obviously doesn't work beyond line of sight or I'm in areas where you can't see the terrain very well. So the next sort of evolution of this is teleoperation and people talk about teleoperation a lot with ground vehicles. This is basically where you take a remote control and you look through the vehicle's own sensors, whether it's like camera or thermal sensors. And then you drive the vehicle based on that sensory feedback that you're getting over a network. So you can go beyond line of sight because you just see what the vehicle sees. You don't have to see the vehicle itself.

So you can teleoperate something from like across the world. If you have a really good connection to that vehicle, if you have a good satellite connection or radio connection to the vehicle.

“And a lot of the work which is being done in Ukraine is teleoperated, uncrewed ground vehicles where you'll actually have a set of people up to five people who are controlling each vehicle.”

And essentially driving it through the terrain using like a handheld controller or you know they're looking through potentially either the vehicles camera sort of cameras from a drone overhead and they're just trying to drive this thing around. The thing which is hard about that is that it occupies at least one person's attention at all times because the person's making all of those decisions. But it also is something where if your comms gets disrupted, the thing's just dead, right? Like it requires a human to drive it and the human can no longer connect to it.

So one of the strategies is you cut the comms to the vehicle, you know use EW or whatever to cut the comms and then you strike it because it's just a sitting duck.

So autonomy is extremely powerful because it allows the vehicle to sense the environment, represent it, plan through the environment all on board like at the edge makes its own decisions.

And it doesn't require a human to to essentially drive it. So when you have an autonomous vehicle, you can tell it where you wanted to go and it will just go there. And that means that you can focus your attention on something else. That might be another autonomous vehicle. It might be another task. So for example, you can send a vehicle back to resupply you, but you don't have to be focused anymore. You can do your job.

If your comms get cut, the thing's going to keep going and you know continue the mission.

“And so one of the things we're starting to see out of the Russian Ukraine conflict is that the Russians are starting to add autonomy to ground vehicles to deal with the contested comm situation.”

Because it's so hard for them to maintain comms, autonomy allows the vehicles to continue to move without human oversight. So that's another piece of this. So we think about this as kind of force multiplication and resilience to contested comms in farming. Well not so another thing without autonomy to correct me from wrong is let's say you have a hundred of these.

You say a five hundred of these.

Yeah. And then you have all these other, you know, we talked about at the beginning. All these other companies that are doing, you know, we shield AI with their, with their expat, we got Seronic with the autonomous boats, we got Enduro vacant stuff. We have mock making stuff with all these companies are jumping all up, you know, lots of autonomous stuff. But just over land AI alone, I mean let's say that there's five hundred of these vehicles, you know.

We're talking about the invasion of Felicia. Yeah. These will all be able to communicate with each other and accomplish the mission without being

Mike, without each one being micromanaged. They'll all read off each other, communicate with each other. No one, everything is doing correct. Yeah. So think about that. So this is this is our vision for it for the company.

“So you should think about it as like imagine that there's five people that are controlling something like 500 vehicles.”

And like each of those five people, you know, maybe each one's controlling 100 vehicles. And those vehicles are coordinating with each other to complete that mission. So we think about the autonomy, which is onboard the vehicle, this is what we call platform autonomy. It's how each individual vehicle, you know, analyzes terrain, makes decisions, decides how to drive. Then there's a notion of mission autonomy where multiple vehicles can coordinate with each other.

And the real idea here is to make it really easy for one person to have a immense effect on the battlefield, to control many, many different vehicles and the payloads on them. And so, you know, going back to earlier part of the conversation, we view this as something like, you know, a gamer who's playing like a real time strategy game, something like like starcraft, where you're controlling like 200 different units. Can a person do that in the real world with, you know, real platforms, like like our ultra platform. And that's what we're building up towards. So that whole idea is, you know, single operator, massive force through potentially hundreds of different vehicles and payloads.

Wow. And so we'll move to the point where, you know, I just brought up all these other companies, we will it move to the point where these overland AI vehicles are communicating with. Shield AI's x-bat with psoronics boats. I mean, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll get to the point where the entire battle space is coordinated under. One brain. So, you know, the, the show answer is that like yes, the ground vehicles will be communicating with like aerial vehicles and the different payloads and they'll be coordinating in order to complete a task.

“I think we still, you know, one of the things which is really important to keep in mind is, again, like these are all just tools. So you really want to enable an operator to achieve their objective as effectively as possible.”

And that means, you know, not just kind of handing everything over to to an AI brain, but having, you know, essentially like AI assistance who are allowing a human to choose courses of action to coordinate, you know, ground vehicles or payloads or aerial vehicles more effectively and so on. Let's talk about, let's talk about African lion. What happened there? Okay, so African lion is an exercise. It's one of the largest exercises in Africa. So it's a place where US war fighters work with, with partner nations and things like that to essentially train and demonstrate capabilities.

And one vehicle had a crows remote weapon station with an M240 machine gun on it. Another vehicle had a rocket propelled breaching system on it. And they were using these vehicles for a breaching operation. So essentially what happened was, they sent one vehicle forward with machine gun on it providing security.

The vehicle was quickly following it, moved to a breached point. Essentially applied the payloads. So the, it's a explosive line charge. Something like a mickleck if people know what that is.

But essentially an explosive rope that gets launched out in front of the vehicle and produces a, it blows up and produces like a safe corridor that can then be proved with another vehicle.

So they're using this to, to reduce obstacles out in front of, of the force in as, as part of, of, and it's salt.

“And the thing which is really important about this is that there's extremely dangerous operation. Like when you're doing things like breaching, every area of the defensive obstacle belts are being watched by, by an adversary.”

And as you move forward to try to reduce those obstacles, like the combat engineers, everyone's targeting them. So even in a successful breaching operation, you're expecting something like like 50% Cash will too rate. So if you're able to do that with autonomous vehicles, like the way that like 173rd airborne was was demonstrating. That's taking, you know, in their estimate up to almost two platoons about 40 people out of that extremely dangerous situation. You're just sending the machines forward to, to do that, to work that problem, to create the breach in the obstacle belt, and then they're able to, to move through. So they're very excited about about the technology, but it's just an example of like more fighters using, using our vehicles, putting payloads on them, coordinating as part of their units movement maneuver.

So pretty exciting to see. It's fascinating stuff. Yeah. Wow. The game has changed a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Holy shit. And then it just runs blocking the trackers, the fishing sites, and the surveillance ads across every app on the device all day quietly, without anybody having to do anything.

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And you're going to get a quick look at the product market, or your first big enterprise. With KEE, the development of the car is also the advantage of the security and the future.

“The team in which security and compliance are really close to the market, which is far too long, it's almost out. That's why many startups are happy and happy. And when it comes to the market, it's not just in the world. Now start at the market.”

You know, we don't have, at least I don't have detailed knowledge of everything that they're doing, but we do read academic papers that come out of Chinese institutions, and they're certainly working on ground robots.

We think we're pretty far ahead right now, but, you know, they're working hard to catch up. So what kind of, is there any, what other kind of weapons systems do you think will be putting on these, these altras?

“I think, for any of, you know, you think about uncrew ground vehicles and autonomous ground vehicles, you can put it depends on the size of vehicle you put like almost anything on them, right?”

So any type of vehicle that you have today, which can carry anything from, you know, a very small vehicle might be a couple hundred pounds up to tens of thousands of pounds.

You can put on a potentially Thomas vehicle. So that's, you think about smaller things might be smaller remote weapon stations might just be sensors, right, radar, optics, things like this, but much larger vehicles, large missile systems, right? So ship interdiction missiles, anti-air missiles, all sorts of things. You could put pretty much anything on those pretty much, are you familiar with the apparatus? Yes, so you could put Leonidas mounted on one of these damn things and.

Absolutely, then you have, yeah, drone defense for an entire fucking battalion.

Yeah, usually when we're thinking about drone defense, you know, it's going to be a layered defense, so you, you're going to want maybe something like, you know, you know, operations system, but you might also want kinetic air defense. That might be drones, like, you know, drone interceptors, it might be machine guns, but you can imagine a whole set of these, you know, many different vehicles with different defensive systems, creating that that layered defense. And we think it'll probably be something like this, so that, you know, even if drones are getting through one type of defense,

they're going to hit by another. I mean, even if you lose some of your vehicles or systems, they're more to take their place. Let's talk about the technical mode, the team and the peer threat. Sure. So the way that we think about the technology that we're developing, we really are thinking about it as, you know, developing an autonomous version of core battlefield functions, right? So, like, either that ISR or breaching for, as, as examples, where you have multiple vehicles with payloads that are performing a task.

Now, in order to do any of that, in order to have a set of autonomous vehicles with payloads that's, you know, doing something complicated,

“think about, like, first principles, like, what do you have to do first? Well, you have to be able to carry stuff and move it, you know, like move it from one place to another in the environment.”

And when you look at our history as a company, we started with what we think is the hardest problem there first, which is being able to understand terrain and move through that terrain.

Given that basis, you can then build off of that. So, you know, I, one of our strongest technical modes is the fact that we're the best in the world at being able to see and understand terrain and move vehicles through it. We can put payloads, like, pretty much anywhere that a vehicle can, can, can drive, right? And so, once you have that, as you now combine this to say, like, instead of just moving one vehicle or one type of payload, now I'm moving multiple vehicles, multiple payloads, that foundation allows you to build up those capabilities.

So, we think that that's our, you know, one of our biggest technical modes is we have just this incredible team coming from, you know, deep tech places like Waymo and cruise and, you know, self-driving car companies, some of the top artificial intelligence labs, you know, they're working for us focused on these problems and creating, you know, this AI essentially that allows you to, to move payloads in the environment.

“So, that's technical mode, I can't quite remember the other questions, but that's really a foundation of everything.”

I mean, we had one thing that I didn't ask, I think we started talking about it out there, and then I said we'll come back in and, okay, and discuss it because it was so damn hot out there, but, you know, what does it look like, you know, when we're talking about controlling all these autonomous vehicles, especially when it comes to hundreds.

So, you're not going to be just like looking through the vehicle sensor and remote controlling it because you have hundreds of them, how can you do that? So, the way that we have designed the software is that you essentially have overhead map, something like a satellite map, and you're able to see all of the different vehicles on that map, all of the different, you know, autonomous assets on the map.

“So, that gives you, you know, and you can zoom out and you can, you know, look at, so you can look at terrain features, you can look at where all the vehicles are, you can see what payloads are on the different vehicles.”

And then the question is, how do you now coordinate and control hundreds of of those assets? And you need to be able to do that by selecting vehicles, grouping vehicles, telling groups of vehicles to go to like one place or another, telling them to execute a certain payload, you know, at a particular location, so that you can kind of quickly move between, you know, sets of vehicles and, and essentially tell them where to go.

Again, a lot like a real-time strategy game. We're also working on tool. This looks like, this is what we were talking about the beginning, this looks like sounds weird, looks like world of warcraft.

Yeah, yeah, you're sending a group of things, giving it a task. It's not around the next thing.

“Yeah, I mean, and I think, you know, one of the reasons why we've looked to some of these types of games is because it's one of the few places where humans are actually controlling something like hundreds of different assets.”

Like, Starcraft is a great example of that and Warcraft. But, you know, the tools that people use for grouping, for moving, for coordinating assets in those types of games are things that we can take those ideas and apply them here as well, so that a single operator can control many, many different assets.

Another thing that we're developing is things like AI assistance, which can help to suggest, you know, particular tasks.

You can just say, okay, I need to move 10 vehicles into this area, provide reconnaissance here, and it will tell me how those vehicles are going to move suggest to me solutions to these problems so that I can make decisions faster. So this is part of, like, essentially using AI to increase your decision advantage. Now, we're not saying we hand over, you know, the actual decision making to the AI, but the AI can suggest solutions that can can help you to handle, you know, more assets at once.

Wow. Wow. I got a hot question for you. All right. Ready? In 1941, 353 Japanese planes came off six carriers and hit Pearl Harbor in under two hours.

They sank or crippled all eight battleships and killed over 2,400 Americans. And here's the part people forget. We had warnings. We'd broken their codes. Our own ambassador flagged a possible attack a year earlier in Congress later said the real failure wasn't intelligence. It was imagination. Nobody could picture it until the harbor was on fire. Today, China's Army robot dogs, they build 90% of the world's drones, and they just flew a mothership not long ago that launched a hundred Kamikazi drones in a single swarm. The warnings are everywhere again. Are we sleepwalking into a robotic Pearl Harbor?

“I hope not, but I think it's correct. There are warnings everywhere. We're seeing robots used in the battlefield. Again, in Ukraine, you know, there's both by Ukrainians and Russians.”

So, you know, we, and I think other defense tech companies are certainly paying attention to this. Like we are trying to understand what capabilities our adversaries have, and also ensure that the US military has similar better capabilities. So, so we, we think about these sorts of things all the time, right? It's the new technology which is going to be defining like these next conflicts. And then I think it's all of our jobs to ensure that the decision makers understand that this technology exists and what it's capable of.

But, you know, there may be work to be done. Sometimes these things aren't really real to people until, unfortunately, they actually experience them.

So, our best bet is to really be watching and taking seriously what is happening in these conflicts and what are our different series are developing.

“I mean, do you feel the Department of War is taking the seriously? Do they understand the capabilities that you guys have?”

But when you look at that thing out there, what it's capable of, it's very surprising and almost alarming to me that they, you know, 15, 15, you have a contract for 15. Yeah, why don't you have a contract for 10,000? Yeah, I mean, it should be, you know, I think the Department of Defense is trying to, Department of War is, and the services are trying to move faster, but the procurement system was really designed for a different era and a different type of war. And that's something that I think, you know, all of the Defense Tech founders who you've had on here will probably agree with, right, and something that we're all fighting hard against.

Now, the, we've seen the Department of War speed things up and, you know, some of it, like I was saying, but a little bit earlier, we have actually gone from, you know, University research to production contract, even if it's, you know, a relatively small initial one. I've been in, like, three years, which is about right, maybe a little slow for, like, you know, the tech sector, but that's lightning fast for, for, um, Department of War. And we've made use of Defense Innovation Unit and a lot of the new tools, um, the App Fit Contracting process and things like that that have come online recently, so I, you know, I do want to credit the Department of War for moving faster, but there's still so much work to be done.

In order to, to move at the speed that we need to move at.

“So, you know, it's something I think, like, we're all working on and trying to, our other countries better customers than our own country.”

If it were this problem for, like, not, not, not necessarily like their own stuff for, or for stuff that are not, not, not, not overland a eye for things that America, Americans, like yourself are developing here in this country, or other countries. Maybe you crane. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I've, I've heard of these issues happening and we, here we have the best that the fucking world has to offer right here. Developing groundbreaking new technology that's going to change how war is fought.

That's, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's just such an upgrade. Especially with a company, like, upper, all these companies, man. Yeah, like, which, everything, everybody, you know, everybody that sat across with me in the Defense Tech sector,

what you guys are developing is, it's fucking incredible. Yeah. You know, but I see it being utilized in Ukraine.

You know what I mean? And, and I see it, and I, it bothers me when, when we're sending all this stuff. Maybe we aren't, but see things similar being utilized in Ukraine, and, and it just seems like our country is not taking advantage of the talent that we have here. It's fucking scares me. Yeah. I mean, we, there's, there's kind of, like, we have all this, we have all this talent.

“There's things to be concerned about. And I think there's, there's things to be hopeful about. So, like, on the one hand, you know, your, I think you're right.”

I think countries like Ukraine, I mean, they're adopting tech as fast as they possibly can't.

There's just a statistic out saying something like, there's been two million casualties in, in that conflict, right?

And about a million and a half Russian and about half a million Ukrainian. And one of the ways that Ukraine has been able to continue to fight and hold off the Russians is through, you know, all of this technological innovation. It's existential for them. They, they have to do this or they will lose, right? Like, and so they will do whatever it takes to win here.

And I think that, you know, it's unfortunate, of course, because we have a little bit of luxury right now. Like, we are not in a conflict like the Ukrainians.

So we have the space to be able to potentially build this technology and transform our forces, but we don't have the urgency, right? And so I think, I think that's part of the problem. On the, on the positive side, I do think that we have the best minds in the world here. I think we can do it. But it's again, it's a matter of arguing it. We are doing government, it's not by keeping up with you guys. But it could be, it could be done faster, right? Like, we could accelerate this. And, you know, that's a fight that we just have to continue to, to make it right, to continue to fight, to get this tech into the government faster.

“And, and I think going back to, you know, thinking about some of the DARPA stuff earlier, like, we're creating incredible new technology.”

But then you really got a fight to, like, actually get the Army and Marine Corps and services to actually, you know, try it, iterate, you know, ultimately, ultimately use it and incorporate it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If we were a tech tomorrow, do you think we could survive a sea or ground invasion? I mean, I think I, I think we would absolutely survive as a sea of ground invasion. I think we would mobilize very quickly. I think those, the urgency would be there. And, you know, we would, we would do whatever it took to win.

“So, I'm, you know, I think very positive and optimistic on that. Like, I think when we're pressed, we can, we can do a lot.”

But I also think that, you know, we could be better prepared. So, we too.

Last thing. Yeah. Any factoring. Are you guys manufacturing these yourselves? Yeah. So scale up. So we're, we're trying to scale as quickly as possible. We are manufacturing the ultra vehicles. I think I mentioned before that they're based on Polaris, you know, engines and drive trains and things like that. But we're upgrading the suspension. We're, you know, putting in the payload deck, adding the compute the sensors and everything. We've got factory running in in Seattle. That's doing this right now.

“But, and we, I think we've, like, five X manufacturing over the last six months or so. And we just, we need to do a lot more. So we're building up that capability as, as fast as possible.”

And again, the more support we get from, from the government, the more we, we actually work with war fighters, the more demand there is. And there's, there's a ton of demand right now. So we're scaling as quickly as we can. Right on. Well, Barron, I really appreciate you coming. It was an honor to interview you and I love, I love everything. Overland day, I still want that thing out there is super impressive. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you taking the time to learn a little bit more about what we're doing and inviting us out and being able to show you some of the things that we're building. So thank you. Thank you.

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