Every October, the Association of the United States Army brings the Army community and its industry partners to Washington, D.C. for its Annual Meeting & Exposition, the largest land power forum in North America. At this year’s show, autonomy dominated the conversation. Here’s what our team learned in discussions on the show floor about what it will take to make next generation systems trustworthy in the field.Autonomy was everywhere in Washington last week. The Army is standing up a new command for autonomous machines, and defense leaders are calling for robotic systems to scale “from thousands to millions.” Nearly every major vehicle maker on the floor had an uncrewed platform or an autonomy kit to show.
What struck us most wasn’t any single platform; it was what they all have in common. Every one of those systems depends on its communications, whether that means a link to an operator, to a command station or to other machines working alongside it. And they all face obstacles in making sure that communication is trustworthy.
Latency is a challenge
Whether a platform is being teleoperated, coordinating with other uncrewed systems or receiving updated tasking, the speed of communication shapes how well it performs. High or unpredictable latency slows response times, limits how closely systems can work together and reduces confidence in the commands being sent. For mission-critical operations, it can have severe consequences and even compromise safety.
As programs push toward faster platforms and larger teams of crewed and uncrewed systems, low-latency communications are becoming a baseline requirement, not just a nice-to-have. And the reality is that many programs aren’t there yet.
Planning for communications-denied environments
In conversation after conversation, we heard the same concern: systems perform well on a test range with a clean signal, but the field is different. Jamming, terrain, dense urban areas, congested networks and long distances all degrade the link. That raises a critical question: what happens to safety when communications are contested, intermittent, or lost entirely? Most platforms don’t yet have a reliable answer, and that makes it harder for machines to move out of the test range and into real-world conditions.
Safety can’t be an add-on
Right now, the industry is so focused on getting autonomous machines to function effectively that safety often isn’t being accounted for. When we asked about safety systems for new machines, we often heard answers like “we’re not there yet,” suggesting that safety is something you can bolt on later, once the autonomy is proven.
The trouble is that the programs we spoke with have long lists of things they want their systems to do next: team crewed and uncrewed vehicles, hand off control, swap payloads and run one platform across many missions. Every new capability changes the safety picture. When safety is fixed and hard-coded, each step forward means re-engineering it from scratch.
The better path is to build the safety case in from the beginning, on an architecture that is both configurable and dynamic, so it can adjust and adapt in real time as environments, missions, and tasks change. Done right, safety that’s built-in early grows and scales with the system instead of holding it back.
How FORT closes the gaps
Each gap we heard about at AUSA comes back to the same question: can a command be trusted to arrive, and what does the machine do when it can’t?
That’s the problem FORT is built to solve. Our assured command and control solutions deliver safety-rated communication from any sender, such as a handheld controller, command station, or another machine, to any receiver, such as a vehicle, station, or launcher. Every command is verified before it’s acted on, and if the link is lost, the receiver moves immediately to a known safe state. The same core FORT architecture can be deployed across different platforms, and tuned to each mission’s latency, range, and safety requirements. And because it runs over the networks programs already use, including radio, cellular, satellite and mesh, teams don’t have to redesign their communications to get assured control.
Our new Connectivity Aggregation software, which we introduced at the show last week, was designed to tackle the challenge of latency and degraded links in challenging environments. Rather than depending on a single connection, it combines multiple network links into one reliable, low-latency connection. If one path is jammed, blocked by terrain or congested, the others keep commands moving. That puts resilient, low-latency control within reach of more platforms. Learn more about Connectivity Aggregation here.
The best time to start with safety is now
“We’re not there yet” was one of the most common answers we heard when we asked about safety. But early development is exactly where safety should start. Before requirements are locked in and before hardware is fielded, we can help programs design a safety architecture that is flexible enough to grow with your system, rather than retrofitting one later at greater cost and risk.
If you’re in early development on an autonomous or uncrewed program, talk with our team about building safety in from day one.
