The Navy last week moved the Advanced Explosive Ordnance Disposal Robotic System (AEODRS) increment 1 into source selection after releasing the request for proposals in late June, but the Air Force pulled out of the program to pursue a commercial off-the-shelf product to meet its needs sooner.
AEODRS will be a three-increment family of systems: increment 1 will weigh less than 35 pounds, perform reconnaissance and assessment missions and fill a current capability gap; increment 2 will weigh less than 165 pounds, perform downrange reconnaissance and assist in handling ordnance, and replace the current Man Transportable Robotic System (MTRS); and increment 3 will be truck-pulled, provide heavy lifting capability for base/infrastructure missions, and replace the Remote Ordnance Neutralizations System (RONS), Tom Dee, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for expeditionary programs and logistics management, said during a presentation at the National Defense Industrial Association’s ground robotics conference on Thursday.
The RFP for increment 1 closed last week and the Navy, as the acquisition lead for joint service EOD technologies, will spend the next several months reviewing the bids and selecting a winner, Dee told Defense Daily after his presentation.
But Robert Diltz, robotics program manager for the Air Force Civil Engineer Center, said during a later presentation at the conference that the Air Force has chosen to pursue a COTS solution to ensure a faster and more predictable acquisition process. The program had already fallen behind schedule in the past–AEODRS should have gone into full-rate production in fiscal year 2015, according to the Navy’s previous timelines–and Diltz said the Air Force was concerned about “unknown unknowns” inherent to technology development.
Diltz told Defense Daily after his presentation that the Air Force had become aware of at least five COTS products that met its needs and would allow for faster delivery of the 160 systems for training and deployment the Air Force hopes to buy. The Air Force has already determined the main key performance parameters (KPPs), which are all similar to AEODRS, and is finalizing the more incidental KPPs before releasing an RFP in the first quarter of fiscal year 2015.
The Air Force still intends to participate in AEODRS increments 2 and 3, he added.
The Navy, meanwhile, will continue on as planned. Dee said all the services worked together on requirements development and at the end would be free to buy or not buy AEODRS, depending on their needs and budgets. But with the Navy solely in charge of seeing the program through the development and acquisition process, joint service participation is not a must-have for the program to succeed.
Meanwhile, AEODRS increments 2 and 3 are moving into the engineering and manufacturing development phase for about a year and a half, Dee said. The Navy is still deciding whether, at the end of the EMD phase, the two will be rolled into a single RFP for industry of if they’ll move forward as separate acquisitions.
The beauty of the family of systems setup is that, in addition to using the new Interoperability Profile that the Defense Department hopes all systems will eventually use, “we expect within the AEODRS system you’re going to have a common operating system, user operating system across all three increments.”
“They’re going to have way different payloads and capability, he said. “Increment 1 is small–you’re going to have a camera, a manipulator of sorts. As you get into the larger systems, you develop more capabilities and the modules are going to be different. Power packs will obviously be different. The platforms will be different. But the thing that we’re focused on is really that interoperability capability.”
He said all three increments would have different sets of plug-and-play arms, sensors, cameras and other tools, “but from an operator perspective, it’ll be the same common system they’ve become accustomed to in increment 1,” leading to a simplified training pipeline for EOD technicians.