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

31:01And 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 vehicle's 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. Oh, shit. So that's what the army was looking at. Now, is it actually learning, or are 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 drive. And then it tries to replicate what the human does.

31:35And 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 brake 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, exactly. Like a sand loop over and over?

32:13So we started out by driving on a sand track. And we were able to achieve these really fast lap times where the vehicle's 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 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, and then you switch up the track, will, I mean, will it be able to take what it learned on track A and apply it to track B immediately?

33:05Or will it, do you understand? Basically what I'm saying is how do we go from a track to high-speed chase in the middle of, I don't know, Manhattan. So this is kind of like a fundamental challenge in machine learning. Like if you learn, for example, how to drive really fast on oval track where you're always going in one direction, right? You'll learn how to drive really fast while 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 be able to perform well on a track like that? And the short answer is not without some sort of work.

33:53So 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.

34:32And so you need to collect new data as you move to that new type of environment or new type of problem, incorporate that into your learning algorithm, and then it will start to do better on that new type of track. And that matters 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.

35:16That there'll still be aspects of that environment that they've seen before. So 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 off-road, it could be in the middle of a city, but we're talking left turns, right turns, heavy braking, fast acceleration, drifting, all of that stuff. Will it eventually learn what it needs to learn to be able to have a complicated new route, run it the first time, and it will run it perfectly? It will go as fast as the machine is capable of. Yeah, it's certainly possible.

36:05And that's what we're always striving for. So when we're putting, you know, ungrouped ground vehicles, 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. Every time our autonomous vehicles are out in the world, they are basically, you know, we've trained them so that they're, we don't like pre-map environments or anything like that. It's as if they're encountering that environment for the first time.

36:47And they're constantly learning. So the more environments that we encounter, the more data we get, like the better and better the system gets. Okay. But the goal is always kind of moving towards that optimal movement. How close are you to that goal? Depends on the environment. I mean, I think we can already drive faster than humans in some environments. So, yeah, it's pretty cool. Wow. Very interesting. And so how long did you spend 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.

37:43So, like, here's what the situation was. DARPA back in 2004 and 2005 had something called the Grand Challenge or Grand Challenges. So these were challenges where they were trying to incept ground autonomy. So this actually goes back to the NDAA in 2001. This is basically where Congress decided in 2001, they were like, 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 this would be easy.

38:25No one knew how to make these vehicles autonomous. Where did the idea come from? Well, I think, you know, there had been, you know, work in robotics where people were moving vehicles in simpler environments autonomously. And so 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 that not just provides safety, but potentially tactical things that you can do. We can maybe talk about that in a little bit. But in order to make those vehicles autonomous, you needed to know how to do it, right?

39:06And 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? Like you have some crazy challenge. DARPA is out there and can create a program, pull together some of the best minds in the US to focus, like really focus on it for up to about four years and try to solve a problem. And so in 2004 and 2005, they came up with the DARPA Grand Challenge where they were trying to race vehicles from Barstow, California to Prim Nevada. It was about 135 miles on dirt roads. And they just laid down a challenge.

39:53They 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 Oshkosh had a 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, CMU's vehicle, I think, made it that far. It got stuck, caught fire.

40:32It 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. Oh, shit. 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 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 companies like Waymo or Aurora Innovation and so on. So these autonomous driving companies, commercial companies. So by 2012, let's say, a lot of work was being done in the commercial sector, bootstrapped off of this DARPA work, right?

41:24So the military started this whole thing because they wanted autonomous vehicles. People started to build autonomous vehicles because of this DARPA program, but then basically just went off into industry and were working on like robo-taxis and autonomous trucks and things like this. So by 2019, coming back to my story, DARPA was in a position where they were like, well, cool, we have autonomous taxis. There's been a lot of progress in this area, but where's our autonomous tanks? Where are autonomous military vehicles? The whole point of this was initially to support the military. And so DARPA RACER was a program that got stood up.

42:09it started in 2021 to reboot autonomy for defense. So specifically to take a lot of the learnings that had been produced over the previous 20 years or so for the on-road autonomous driving industry and work which had been done in robotic perception and robotic vehicle control, bring that back together and focus on defense problems. And so that meant trying to drive much faster, larger and faster vehicles off-road, what we call complex natural terrain. So no roads at all, right? Like through deserts, through forests, through snow, things like this. And contested terrain. So thinking about how do you move when you not only do you 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.

43:12And so that's what the DARPA racer program was. So I had already been doing work at, you know, at 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 the Performer Team, to attack these problems for the military through DARPA starting in 2021. So did they recruit you from the IEEE conference? So the way that that worked was through the research I was doing and the publications I was putting out to the world, Army Research Lab saw that the technology we were developing might be really helpful for the types of problems they wanted to solve.

44:01I 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. Okay. 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, U.S. Army was one of the organizations that started to fund my research. And when you fund research, you can say, like, hey, 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.

44:37And then you provide those solutions back to the Army. So that's what I was doing when I was working at Georgia Tech and University of Washington was my lab was partially funded by the U.S. 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 U.S. Army, and then they decided to fund my lab at, like, a much higher level... Wow. ...to, like, attack these problems of how do you drive vehicles off-road and all sorts of different types of terrain at high speeds.

45:22Wow. 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 10 years, more than a decade. And my lab was doing a lot of that work in academia, you know, before we spun out Overland. Wow. Wow. Well, before we get into Overland, 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. And the more research comes out, the clearer it gets. If your sleep is off, everything else gets harder.

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48:12join the patreon community today and get access to the full experience all right let's talk about the the textron m5 sure yeah so uh as part of the darpa racer program so this is darpa program where we're trying to develop um ground vehicle autonomy for the military, we started out working with Polaris Razor side-by-sides. So these are very capable vehicles, they can go very fast, they've got four wheels, about 3 ,000 pounds, about the size of a small SUV, something like this. And in the first part of the DARPA Racer program, there were multiple teams and we were essentially like racing these Polaris Razors.

49:05So So trying to record the best possible times through a wide variety of different terrains and test scenarios. As we progressed through the program, the DARPA program manager didn't want us to just be using those small vehicles. So we moved up to the Textron M5. The Textron M5 is basically a robotic combat vehicle prototype. It's about 12 tons, so it is much larger. Holy shit! You went from a side-by-side to a 12-ton vehicle? Yeah, it's a 12-ton tracked vehicle. Oh my gosh. So it's about the size of a 113, so it looks like a tank. Like a small tank, I guess, but pretty heavy vehicle, tracked.

49:56It's electric, so really aggressive. It has the ability to essentially go from zero to 60, think about like a Tesla, but like a tank version of that. Wow. So really, really awesome vehicle to work with. And we're putting autonomy on that vehicle and then driving that through off-road terrain. Okay. Yeah. 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 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.

50:45We were focused on not only driving on the side by sides, but also the much larger vehicle. So we're the only team that actually worked with these. And there aren't that many of them. There was something like four or five Textron M5s ever produced. But we had all of them, and we were just smashing through terrain in these huge tracked vehicles. Pretty awesome. And so what is the point of the competition? Do they buy the technology from you, or do they fund the technology? That's a great question. How does it work? Yeah. Yeah, like, 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.

51:30In this case, develop ground vehicle autonomy for the U.S. military, so for our soldiers and Marines. But often in a DARPA program, even if the program is very successful, like ours was, how do you actually take that technology and then get it into the hands of the warfighter? Like, 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 technologies ever actually get transitioned. So just because you succeed in developing a new capability doesn't mean that the warfighter gets that capability.

52:20This is actually why we created Overland AI. We were like in this program and we had this new capability and we were just like, this is incredible. We can drive extremely fast off-road. We can do it in a variety of different types of vehicles. We have the thing that DARPA wanted us to produce. Like, we actually did it. Now, how can the warfighter benefit? And so we felt that 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 a 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 tactics.

53:29So that's why we created Overland AI. Like, we thought the Army, like, this is just gonna 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, to develop the capability, but just because DARPA... Then they 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 buy and transition that technology. From DARPA or from you? Yeah, so the way that DARPA works is that these DARPA programs are generally four years long.

54:14They have a time limit, and that's part of the point. 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, right? So, like, you've created it. Now someone has to continue to, like, transfer it, to, like, get it onto military vehicles, to push it into units. And that's where a lot of these programs die because you create the technology, but you can't, that no one picks it up like when it's over.

55:02I would think there would be, so this is, I mean, what would you call this? Like an incubator? Like 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 own the IP. Do you also own the IP? Yeah, so the way that this works is like 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.

55:51You know, 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 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. It's almost like a rough draft.

56:45I would think there would be... But then someone has to kind of pay for that transition. And that's often, again, where these programs end up having problems, where you develop a new technology, but then who adopts it, who actually transitions it to the warfighter? Are these classified? I mean, are these classified? I would think there would be venture capital firms galore just surrounding these projects. Well, yeah, yeah. So sometimes, yes, right? Only 4 % make it to the Warfighter. That's 96 % of the projects. It's crazy, right? It's like, oh, yeah. Yeah, but in some sense, that's actually what happened here, right?

57:26Because we said, okay, we're going to take this IP. We license it, right? So that IP is licensed to Overland AI. We created this company to essentially take that IP and then turn it into a commercial autonomy stack that is reliable and we keep building on it, we keep improving it, and then we can transition that back to the warfighter. So Overland AI got its start by focusing on the software portion of this, right? Take these good ideas that were developed during DARPA. We licensed 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 onto a vehicle to make that vehicle autonomous.

58:15And we had worked with different types of vehicles. We discussed the side-by-side or the big Textron M5 that we can make autonomous. We really wanted to develop software which would work on any vehicle that the military had. And so Overland was stood up to do that. And to your point about VCs, we're a VC-backed company, right? So they're 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 defense tech territory, right, where you now have to fight all of these battles to go from this good core idea or good core IP to actually getting it procured, right?

59:09And that takes time and effort. And so our story as a defense tech company is really similar to a lot of other stories, except that we got this start by doing all of this initial research to accept a new technology that the military really wanted. Very interesting. And so the DARPA competition ends, you win. and take all the information with you and develop Overland AI. Right. So we started Overland AI, and Overland actually was formed before the DARPA competition completed, so we became part of the competition as well. We then, as the competition was going on, You know, we were developing new technology for moving like really quickly through a lot of different biomes, so different types of environments.

1:00:11And then we were really trying to think, and this is Overland AI started in 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 it into a commercial piece of software. how do you then get traction with like the Army and Marine Corps? 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 was 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.

1:00:59We 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. So we just started to build the vehicles too. And that's what resulted in, like, this ultra vehicle that you've seen outside where 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 on the vehicles and start to work with warfighting units to really integrate autonomous systems into their concepts of operation.

1:01:52So our path really is initially research and development, starting with DARPA. That then we worked with the Defense Innovation Unit and got a prototype contract with them. We then started to work with Army Applications Lab and winning these SIBRS, these small contracts with the Marine Corps and the Army. We were doing really well with those. and then last year we revealed the Ultra vehicle, a fully autonomous, 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.

1:02:39So we just recently won the first production contract for autonomous ground vehicles in the U.S. military, and that's with the Marine Corps. So it's really this whole process of... And it didn't take that long, right? It's about three and a half years where we went from, like, university lab, R &D, through prototype, fielding with warfighters, production contract. Wow. Three and a half years. Yeah, yeah. Wow. I mean, so who won the contract, or who were you contracted to manufacture? Yeah, yeah, with the Marine Corps. So the Marine Corps is buying a whole set of the autonomous vehicles that we produce.

1:03:23It's part of their ground-based air defense program. And so they'll initially start using those vehicles for autonomous resupply of basically air defense systems. So trying to make sure that they get enough ammunition as they're shooting down drones. Can I... Can you ask how many you're going to manufacture for them? Yeah, so we're manufacturing in the first tranche about 15 of these in the next year or so. So that's what we're starting out with. And one of the things which is 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 those supplies back and forth.

1:04:14But we've been doing a lot of work with other units like 82nd Airborne, 173rd Airborne, other warfighting 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 the Marines about is putting sensors and 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 essentially putting your sensors and putting your counter UAS, for example, payloads on vehicles and moving them away from the places that you're trying to defend, right?

1:05:03So you're disaggregating, you're dispersing, you're essentially making it much harder for an adversary to be able to take everything else, like all of the pieces out when you're defending an area. Interesting. So they're going to be using this for logistics. They're going to be using this for defense. And I 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 bad weather.

1:06:15They can persistently 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 some of these things. You can use them for defense or strike capabilities. So you can put kinetic payloads on them. You can put drones on them, launch them off of the vehicle, so you can 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 removing people from breaching operations, which are just exceptionally dangerous.

1:06:59And 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 run out back and take a look at this thing. 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. That's why I'm on the ladder app. I've got a real coach in my ear on every set. What's next? What weight?

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1:08:19If you're a guy who's been meaning to get back to it, this is the way back. If you have an iPhone, head to ladder.fit.srs and take a quick quiz to get matched with your coach and the right plan for you. Use my link and get a free seven-day trial with no credit card and$10 off your first month if you join. All right, we're out here with Byron Boots, CEO and founder of Overland AI. Get 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.

1:09:05So it has sensors up in the front of the vehicle. There's stereo cameras. There's actually three of them, like one here, one there, one on the other side. LiDAR. So this allows it to see, you know, in this whole area in front of the vehicle. What degree? So actually you can see 360 degrees around it. So like you have these sensors in the front and there's also sensors in the back. So it can just kind of see this 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.

1:09:46Below this deck you have compute. So that's where your computer systems are your power batteries on 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 and light are again. What's the, what does the LiDAR do? So LiDAR basically allows you to see depth in the area around the robot. So think about it as like a depth sensor. It tells you the distance to surfaces in the terrain. Okay. Yeah. What, what, what engine are we running in here?

1:10:38I think it's, It's, you have to ask Chad, it's about, I think, 115 horsepower engine. So this is based, this whole vehicle is actually based on a Polaris M-Razor commercial side-by-side vehicle. Oh, okay. Okay. So the engine, drive-change, 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 on here? So you can put all sorts of different payloads on here. This particular vehicle takes about a thousand pounds of payloads. So we've done everything from fairly straightforward things like comms, making a communication node, to electronic warfare payloads, to remote weapon stations so you can mount you know a machine gun uh on on the vehicle nice um so if you mount a weapon system on here is that all run through autonomous the autonomous stack is that what you call it so the the autonomous stack controls the vehicle it allows an operator to tell um essentially tell the vehicle where they want the vehicle to go so uh it will say something like you know go 10 kilometers to this location, orient in this way.

1:12:06And 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 this location. 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 access the payloads on those platforms.

1:12:45It's like we'll show you how to do that. It's like the old computer games like Warcraft. It's exactly like that. So that's actually how go here, how we think about it. Kill 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 select the units, tell them where to go, execute the payloads and so on. Wow. So I just I mean, with with the with the changing landscape of the battlefield now, now.

1:13:26It was the first autonomous land vehicle I've seen. So you could mount an Epirus direct energy weapon on this thing. So let's say, I mean, Andurl's got their stuff coming out. Shield AI has got that new expat they came out with. You can mount drones. You can mount counter UAS. So what I'm asking is, I don't know if we're there yet. Maybe we're already there and this is old news, but with all these companies, you know, like yours, the submarines, the Saronic, you know, Overland AI, when we do go to a full-scale war, 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 expats, Overland AIs, ground vehicles, Sironics, surface warfare vehicles, submarines, drones, all of it, all of it on the same system?

1:14:33So the military 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 warfighters to actually be controlling some subset of them on the battlefield. But it will all have to be linked together to provide that overall awareness of what you're pushing out there. And so if you have 100, 200 of these things right here, what is the name of this?

1:15:14This is an ultra. ultra yeah 100 200 300 ultras out here and they've got you know surface to air missiles yeah uh for for air defense they've got i don't know 50 calibers for other ground vehicles and anti-personnel and rocket launchers and grenade launchers and drones are they all going to read off each other or is somebody going to have to? So, the way that this 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.

1:15:59We 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 field 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, you know, 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.

1:16:39So platform autonomy is basically the autonomy that lives on the vehicle that allows it to see the terrain, see where vehicles and people are out in that terrain and move through it. And then 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. And then all of that, like all of these different autonomous systems and uncrewed systems which are on the battlefield will be pulled into command and control systems, which allow people to see everything which is out there. Wow. I got a million questions for you, but it's hot as shit out here and humid.

1:17:25Yeah, yeah. Let's see. Let's see. We'll do that inside. That sounds great, but let's see what this thing can 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 see okay like 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 don't have to necessarily spend too much attention like looking at this but um the magenta areas are lethal so those are areas that you know the vehicle you don't want to move the vehicle into as you're as you're teleoperating it you can actually move it um anywhere that you want so this is that big pond that we're digging down there uh this is this is going to be about 50 meters around so it's only seeing up here on this um 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 hold this uh down so you're lower left okay and you hit a and that moves you into autonomy and then you can move this joystick moves the vehicle forward holy shit so that's basically moving it forward and then you can turn using this so we can like turn it to the right.

1:18:57And, you know, when the vehicle is here in front of you, it's tempting to look at the vehicle, but you should 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 could do this from like 5 ,000 miles away. Wow. So left down. Yep. And then push forward.

1:19:27it is it's weird not looking at the vehicle yeah i want i want to look over there so

1:19:45holy shit can i go how do you go backwards okay so to go backwards um hold down this uh control uh so both that and this and then that and then move that backwards there you go

1:20:06Oh, there we are.

1:20:13It will automatically stop. It won't run us over. Let's not test it. All right. Yes.

1:20:22Yeah, there it is. Slowing for person. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's not going to work in war, Byron. I'm just kidding. You can turn that off.

1:20:43dude this is crazy

1:20:54so would somebody be looking at this or like a vr headset or does i guess you could 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 payloads on on the vehicle through the interface up here wow

1:21:28Wow. All right. And then if you want to. Oh, shit. There's a tree. Yeah, maybe back up. In case you can't tell, I'm not a 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 how the vehicle is moving like you would when you're driving and now you're trying to interpret what the vehicle can see like through its own sensors should probably stop right yeah what it's it's actually much safer to put it into autonomy and just tell it where you want it to go and it will find a way to get there without you know hitting anything and we do that while staying safe yeah let's try that I can do that that's awesome all right so shit I did almost hit that damn tree okay let's send it to go get a pizza that sounds great I'm not sure I'm not sure they'll let me do this on on the road can we go over there can we go over here and watch it so 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 and yeah it's it's it's looking at the whole environment around it and then it's determining where it can drive and where it can't drive so that's the first part this notion of traversability like what part of the terrain is traversable and then on top of that there's a semantic understanding of the terrain 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.

1:23:14And right now it's running a safety system, which essentially says like, don't, you know, stop if you get too close to a person or a vehicle. Right on. I mean, how does it differ? Does it pick up like body temperature or how does it? It looks and so it's just using a camera and silhouette. 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 getting ready to do here. Yep.

1:23:49Holy shit. Oh, we're in the way. Let's move back away from it.

1:24:08so yeah as it's moving through the terrain it's also tracking where all the people are right where the vehicles are where they are relative to to it um and then deciding how to how to drive it picked him up it picked him up yeah so it's actually pretty wild that it picked him up in the middle of all those weeds and trees and shit

1:24:38it. You can see one of the benefits of this is, you know, you can just tell it, I want you to go to, again, like this location and you can let it go and it will do its thing. So that was the end of 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 it. Thanks for bringing that badass thing. There's nothing more frustrating than putting in the work and still feeling like your body is not responding the way it used to.

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1:26:07And since taking it, I've noticed steadier energy and better recovery. It's not like a caffeine spike. It's more consistent drive throughout the day. Marsmen is made in the USA, third-party tested, and backed by a 90-day money-back guarantee. For a limited time, our listeners get 50 % off for life, plus free shipping, and three free gifts at mengotomars.com. That's mengotomars.com for 50 % off and three free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. Okay, so after taking a look at this thing, I...

1:26:55This 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 is interested in is logistics.

1:27:11which, I mean, just keeping major supply routes open. Yeah. I mean, constant detection. Could 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. It looked 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 it could detect IEDs? Yeah, so you can put a variety of different types of sensors on the vehicle. So you can certainly detect people and vehicles, and then you can also, we've been putting tethered drones on these, So, you know, the drone can go up in the air and be able to look down on the ground.

1:28:09So if you have, you know, ground penetrating radar or 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 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 will be game-changing, right? You don't have to put a person out there to do it. Do you see these integrating with human forces that are... Do you see these as a forward observations platform for maybe a slew of tanks or MRADs or whatever we're using and then kind of pushing that information back to a larger force or is it going all autonomous?

1:29:10I think the – so, you know, there's a number of statistics out there which are pretty interesting. So you've got 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 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 the U.S. military is that we'll have formations with humans in them.

1:29:57They 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. 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 diversions, right? like you can use them, you know, to... You can use them, you know, for strike capability. You can use them to create that kind of counter-UAS 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... Ukrainian military is saying that it could replace...

1:30:39will replace up to 80 % of infantry...

1:30:4680 % of the infantry. Yeah. And you're saying the U.S. is saying, well, maybe not the U.S., but you see a subtle integration. Why would we do a subtle integration? I mean, I know on one hand, I'm going to piss the warfighter off because I love fighting wars. On the other hand, I'm thinking about my toddlers at home, you know, with all the wars that we're involved in and re-involved in. And I don't want my kids going over there having to do it. I get, you know, and so why do you see a subtle integration of this? Why wouldn't we go full scale and say, hey, you know, like we don't need Private Joe driving this MRAP into hostile territory?

1:31:31Why, like, that's a, I don't want to say a wasted life, but it would be a wasted life if he 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 ground autonomy is that you're really focused on just one of the hardest domains in the military. So just kind of stepping back, there are a lot of folks who are focused on air power or naval power or missiles. But at the end of the day, wars are ultimately won 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.

1:32:16And that's where we have to fight. And, you know, I think when you look at the U.S. and, you know, our casualty rates, something like more than 80 % of combat-related casualties since World War II are infantry. So, of course, you want to, like, you know, I think, like, 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 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.

1:33:06And ultimately, we do want to do that, right? 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 a location 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 on the ground to stay safer, to potentially give them more options, more tools, without totally pulling them out. So to your point, yes, we want to ensure that... We ultimately want to pull as many people out of harm's way as possible, but these are still machines that aren't quite as creative and adaptable as humans.

1:34:03And 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, while also allowing our humans to do what they do best and do maybe more specialized roles on the battlefield. So I think it'll be a process. I mean, just thinking about my time in Iraq, Afghanistan alone, I mean, I have right, IED threat was huge. And then here is a key statistic here. 44 % of US killed in action from 2006 to 2021 were killed by IEDs. 44%. Now, I mean, if these things did have IED detection capabilities, it's got to be better than humans.

1:35:01I mean, there's almost 50 % of the people that were killed would still be here today, just in that application. I think there's a lot you can do there. I mean, there's sensors you can put on the vehicles. The human sensor, like I was just saying, with caught my guy out in the weeds just trying to yeah in a bunch of trees i mean rolling down iraq i mean there were sniper problems there was the guy the trigger the trigger men of ieds i mean i would just i would think that it would pick them up immediately i mean you can't they can't hide from the machine yeah how is it sensing them yeah so the um the machine has cameras on it right And we, depending on the loadout for it, you have, you can have sort of normal RGB cameras, you can have thermal cameras, right?

1:35:53Like 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 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?

1:36:32So really making sure that there is no one out there that, you know, moving first through the terrain. So generally speaking, there's a lot of ideas in 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, whether they're people or tanks or Bradley Fighting Vehicles or XM-30, 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 we're developing.

1:37:20How many of these scenarios have you kind of wargamed or run scenarios on out at wherever? 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 units integrating this technology into the unit. For example, the 82nd Airborne, we worked with 382 for almost six months, just embedded with them up through one of their training rotations down at JRTC in Louisiana.

1:38:02And 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. And we were able to do that. And so then they were like, okay, like, 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, they were using these autonomous vehicles in this force on force exercise, not just for resupply, but also for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

1:38:38There were snipers who were using the vehicles as decoys. 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 the 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 truly autonomous, or is there somebody, is there 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.

1:39:22So, 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 a remote control vehicle. Now that's fine, except you have to actually look at the terrain yourself, look at the vehicle and determine where it's going to go.

1:39:59That obviously doesn't work beyond line of sight or 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 you know, connection to that vehicle, if you have a good satellite connection or radio connection to the vehicle.

1:40:43And a lot of the work which is being done in Ukraine is tele-operated, uncrewed ground vehicles, where you'll actually have a set of people, like up to five people, who are controlling each vehicle and essentially driving it through the terrain using, you know, like a handheld controller or, you know, they're looking through potentially either the vehicle's cameras or the cameras from a drone overhead, and they're just trying to drive this thing around. The thing which is hard about that is that, you know, it occupies at least one person's attention at all times because the person's making all of those decisions.

1:41:19But 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 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. It makes its own decisions, and it doesn't require a human to essentially drive it. So, when you have an autonomous vehicle, you can tell it where you want it to go and it will just go there.

1:42:07And 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. The second thing about autonomy, which is important to understand, is because the vehicle is making decisions based on its own sensing and own onboard compute, if your comms get cut, the thing's going to keep going and 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 comms situation.

1:42:52Because 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 a contested comms environment. Well, now, so another thing with autonomy, too, correct me if I'm wrong, is let's say you have 100 of these. Let's say you have 500 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, Shield AI with their expat. We got Sironic with the autonomous boats.

1:43:31We got Enduro making stuff. We have Mach making stuff. All these companies are jumping all over, you know, lots of autonomous stuff. But just Overland AI alone. I mean, let's say that there's 500 of these vehicles, you know. We're talking, I don't know, the invasion of Fallujah. These will all be able to communicate with each other and accomplish the mission without without each one being micromanaged. They'll all read off each other, communicate with each other, know what everything is doing, correct? Yeah, so think about that. So this is our vision for the company. So you should think about it as, like, imagine that there's five people that are controlling something like 500 vehicles.

1:44:22And, 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 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 an immense effect on the battlefield, to control many, many different vehicles and the payloads on them.

1:45:05And so going back to the earlier part of the conversation, we view this as something like a gamer who's playing a real-time strategy game, something like StarCraft, where you're controlling 200 different units. Can a person do that in the real world with real platforms like our Ultra platform. And that's what we're building up towards. So that whole idea is single operator, massive force through potentially hundreds of different vehicles and payloads. Wow. And so will it move to the point where, I just brought up all these other companies, will it move to the point where these Overland AI vehicles are communicating with Shield AI's expat, with Sironics boats?

1:45:58I mean, will it get to the point where the entire battle space is coordinated under one brain? So, you know, the short answer is that, like, yes, the ground vehicles will be communicating with, like, aerial vehicles and the different payloads, and they will 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 an AI brain, But having, you know, essentially like AI assistants 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.

1:47:08Let'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 U.S. war fighters work with partner nations and things like that to essentially train and demonstrate capabilities. We were part of African Lion working with 173rd Airborne. So the 173rd Airborne had two of our ultra vehicles with different types of payloads on them. One vehicle had a Crow's 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.

1:48:04So essentially what happened was they sent one vehicle forward with machine gun on it providing security. And then a second vehicle was quickly following it, moved to a breach point, essentially applied the payload. So it's an explosive line charge, something like a Miklik, 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 proofed with another vehicle. So they're using this to reduce obstacles out in front of the force as part of an assault. And the thing which is really important about this is that it's an extremely dangerous operation.

1:48:51Like when you're doing things like breaching, every area of the defensive obstacle belts are being watched by an adversary. And as you move forward to try to reduce those obstacles, the combat engineers, everyone's targeting them. So even in a successful breaching operation, you're expecting something like 50 % casualty rate. Shit. So if you're able to do that with autonomous vehicles, like the way that 173rd Airborne was demonstrating, that's taking, 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 do that, to work that problem, to create the breach in the obstacle belt, and then they're able to move through.

1:49:43So they're very excited about the technology. But it's just an example of warfighters using our vehicles, putting payloads on them, coordinating as part of their unit's movement maneuver. So pretty exciting to see. This is fascinating stuff. Yeah. Wow, the game has changed a lot. Yeah. 40 years. Holy shit.

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1:52:08All right, so we're back from the break. And, you know, one thing I'm kind of wondering is what other, I mean, you had mentioned Russia was doing some of this, correct? What about China? They seem to be pretty on the ball with just about everything. Yeah, we don't have, or 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. I think there's several different types. They've been working on robotic dogs and integrating those types of robots into infantry formations.

1:52:51And they're also working on off-road ground vehicle autonomy, similar to some of the stuff that we're doing. We think we're pretty far ahead right now, but they're working hard to catch up.

1:53:10What other kind of weapon systems do you think will be putting on these Ultras? I think for any of, you know, you think about uncrewed ground vehicles and autonomous ground vehicles, you can put, it depends on the size of the vehicle, you can 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 autonomous vehicle. So that's, you think about smaller things, might be smaller remote weapon stations, might just be sensors, right?

1:53:54Radar, 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 this. Pretty much anything. Are you familiar with Epirus? Yes. So you could put Leonidas mounted on one of these damn things, and then you have drone defense for an entire fucking battalion. Yeah, usually when we're thinking about drone defense, it's going to be a layered defense, so you're going to want maybe something like Epirus's system, but you might also want kinetic air defense. That might be drones, like drone interceptors.

1:54:42It might be machine guns. But you can imagine a whole set of these, many different vehicles with different defensive systems, creating that layered defense. And we think it'll probably be something like this. So that even if drones are getting through one type of defense, they're getting hit by another. I mean, even if you lose some of your vehicles or systems, there are more to take their place. Let's talk about the technical moat, 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 developing an autonomous version of core battlefield functions, right?

1:55:26So like either the ISR or breaching 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 doing something complicated, think about first principles. What do you have to do first? Well, you have to be able to carry stuff and move it, 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.

1:56:15Given that basis, you can then build off of that. So one of our strongest technical moats 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 pretty much anywhere that a vehicle can drive. 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 one of our biggest technical moats is we have just this incredible team coming from deep tech places like Waymo and Cruise and self-driving car companies, some of the top artificial intelligence labs.

1:57:12They're working for us, focused on these problems, and creating this AI, essentially, that allows you to move payloads in the environment. So that's technical moat. I can't quite remember the other questions, but that's really the foundation of everything. I mean, one thing that I didn't ask, I think we started talking about it out there, and then I said we would come back in and discuss it because it was so damn hot out there. But what does it look like when we're talking about controlling all these autonomous vehicles, especially when it comes to hundreds? I mean, and it's not remote control.

1:57:56So what does it, I mean, we kind of discussed a little bit out there, but what does it look like? Yeah. for the team or the person or whatever is controlling hundreds of these at once? Yeah, that's a great question. 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 maps, something like a satellite map, and you're able to see all of the different vehicles on that map, all the different autonomous assets on the map.

1:58:34So that gives you, you know, and you can zoom out and you can 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 those assets? And you need to be able to do that by selecting vehicles, grouping vehicles, telling groups of vehicles to go to one place or another, telling them to execute a certain payload at a particular location so that you can quickly move between sets of vehicles and essentially tell them where to go. Again, a lot like a real-time strategy game.

1:59:17We're also working on tools. This is what we were talking about at the beginning. This sounds weird, but it looks like World of Warcraft. Yeah, yeah. You're sending a group of things, giving it a task, and then you're on to the next thing. Yeah, and I think 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. 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 we can take those ideas and apply them here as well so that a single operator can control many, many different assets.

2:00:10Another thing that we're developing is things like AI assistance, which can help to suggest particular tasks. So you can just say like, hey, I need to move 10 vehicles into this area, provide a 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 essentially using AI to increase your decision advantage. Now, we're not saying we hand over the actual decision-making to the AI, but the AI can suggest solutions that can help you to handle more assets at once. Wow, wow. I got a hot question for you.

2:01:05All 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, and Congress later said the real failure wasn't intelligent. It was imagination. Nobody could picture it until the harbor was on fire. Today, China's arming robot dogs. They build 90 % of the world's drones, and they just flew a mothership not long ago that launched 100 kamikaze drones in a single swarm.

2:01:55The 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, there's both by the 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 or better capabilities. And so 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.

2:02:49And 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. So, you know, I think like we are certainly aware of it. I think we're pushing the military to adopt new technology and defenses against it like as quickly as possible. 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 our adversaries are developing. I mean, do you feel that the Department of War is taking this seriously?

2:03:37Do they understand the capabilities that you guys have? I mean, when you're looking at that thing out there, what it's capable of, Yeah. It's very surprising and almost alarming to me that they, you know, 15. 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, or 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?

2:04:28And something that we're all fighting hard against. Now, we've seen the Department of War speed things up. And, you know, like I was saying a little bit earlier, we have actually gone from university research to production contract, even if it's a relatively small initial one, in three years, which is about right, maybe a little slow for the tech sector, but that's lightning fast for Department of War. And we've made use of Defense Innovation Unit and a lot of the new tools, app fit contracting process and things like that that have come online recently. So 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 move at the speed that we need to move at.

2:05:25So it's something I think we're all working on and trying to... Are other countries better customers than our own country? for this problem for for like not not our stuff or for like their own stuff or or for stuff that america not not not overland ai for things that america americans like yourself are developing here in this country or other countries maybe ukraine yeah i mean i i think you know i've 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 it's i mean it's it's uh yeah and it on i mean it's it's it's just such an upgrade it's especially with a company like epa all these companies man yeah like what you every everybody you know everybody that sat across with me in the defense tech sector what you guys are developing is it's incredible yeah you know but

2:06:38I see it being utilized in Ukraine you know what I mean and and I see it in a and I it bothers me when when when we're sending all this stuff maybe we aren't but I see things similar being utilized in Ukraine and in and it just seems like our country is not taking advantage of the talent that we have here. It fucking scares me. Yeah, I mean, there's kind of a... Like, we have all this talent like yourself of what you're building. And I think there's things to be hopeful about. So, like, on the one hand, you know, you're... I think you're right. I think countries like Ukraine, I mean, they're adopting tech as fast as they possibly can.

2:07:25There's just a statistic I was saying, something like, There's been two million casualties 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 have to do this or they will lose, right? And so they will do whatever it takes to win here. It's not existential for the U.S. yet. And I think that means that adoption is just slow. People aren't feeling the pressure to do it.

2:08:16And I think that 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 that's part of the problem. 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... We are doing it. It's our government that's not fucking keeping up with you guys. But it could be done faster, right? Like, we could accelerate this.

2:09:03And, you know, that's a fight that we just have to continue to make, right? To continue to fight to get this tech into the government faster. And I think going back to thinking about some of the DARPA stuff earlier, like, we're creating incredible new technology, But then you really got to fight to, like, actually get the Army and Marine Corps and services to actually, you know, try it, iterate, you know, ultimately use it and incorporate it. Yeah. Yeah. If we were attacked tomorrow, do you think we could survive a sea or ground invasion? I mean, I think we would absolutely survive of seer ground invasion.

2:09:51And I think we would mobilize very quickly. I think those, the urgency would be there and, you know, 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 do a lot. But I also think that, you know, we could be better prepared. Yeah. So. Me too. Last thing, manufacturing. Are you guys manufacturing these yourselves? How fast do you scale up? So 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 drivetrains and things like that.

2:10:37But 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 Seattle that's doing this right now. But I think we've like 5X manufacturing over the last six months or so, and we just need to do a lot more. So we're building up that capability as fast as possible. And again, the more support we get from the government, the more we actually work with warfighters, the more demand there is. And there's a ton of demand right now. So we're scaling as quickly as we can. Right on. Well, Byron, I really appreciate you coming.

2:11:16and it was an honor to interview you, and I love everything Overland AI is doing, and 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. Sure.

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