Autonomous Resupply Starts With Knowing What’s Needed

By David Tuttle, Co-Founder and CEO, Rune Technologies

A platoon sergeant needs 7.62mm ammunition at a specific location, and somewhere nearby an autonomous platform, on the ground or in the air, could carry it. It’s easy to picture the step where software tells that platform where to go. The harder step comes first. Before any vehicle gets tasked, something has to know the platoon needs ammunition and which supply point and platform can cover it.

That holds for every autonomous platform the military is fielding, in the air, on the ground, on the water, and under it. If autonomous resupply is going to work at scale, the system tasking these platforms has to understand supply and demand across the battlefield, along with the sustainment of the autonomous systems themselves.

A system that only handles tasking covers the last mile. Everything before that still sits with a person, who tracks supply and demand on a whiteboard or spreadsheet today and then enters each decision into the tasking software by hand. With 20 autonomous systems, tasking is the main challenge. With 2,000, the challenge becomes knowing what to employ and when, and the person in the middle becomes the bottleneck to decision speed.

The platforms need sustaining too. A ground robot with a dead battery or a vessel with a fault can’t take the mission, and someone has to track that across the fleet.

We built TyrOS to cover the whole chain. It tracks supply and forecasts demand, so the platoon’s need shows up as part of the demand picture in real time, from the edge. From there, TyrOS generates a course of action and can task it out to an autonomous platform through our Autonomy Development Kit (ADK), with no one re-entering the decision in a separate system. TyrOS runs at the edge, so this system keeps working when networks are intermittently denied or degraded.

We launched the ADK in May to give autonomous vehicle makers a standard way to connect their platforms to TyrOS. Once a platform connects, it reports its status, and a logistician can plan a mission with it the same way they plan one with a manned vehicle. We designed it so an engineering team can integrate in days rather than quarters.

The Army is already putting this to work. In August, we integrated TyrOS with drones from Havoc, the all-domain collaborative autonomy company, and completed an end-to-end autonomous resupply mission during xTech Overwatch’s Pegasus Charge III exercise at Fort Hood, Texas. A month later, the Army awarded us a contract for sustainment orchestration of autonomous systems in support of the 1st Cavalry Division.

In October, the Army selected TyrOS as a Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) application for sustainment mission command across I Corps, giving commanders and logisticians at all echelons a view of what units have, what they need today and into the future. That view is what autonomous resupply depends on. The award follows our work on both NGC2 prototyping teams, Anduril and Lockheed Martin.

Autonomy companies build the software that runs their own platforms, and units in the field operate mixed fleets from several companies alongside manned vehicles. A commander needs one logistics picture across all of them, tied to the requests coming in from the units they support.

For companies building autonomous systems, the mission starts with that platoon sergeant’s need. Connecting to the system that sees it puts a platform in front of the logisticians who plan resupply every day. If you build autonomous systems for military logistics, we want to work with you.