The German startup ARX Robotics has announced it will open a new HQ in the UK in London and invest £45 million to open a research, development and production plant in southern England that will create 90 new jobs in the next two-and-a-half years.
The new facility will have the capacity to produce up to 1,800 land drones each year, and will also work on systems that enable existing armoured vehicles to operate autonomously.
ARX Robotics’s main product at present is the GEREON RCS modular, tracked Uncrewed Ground Vehicle which has been supplied to Ukraine and has also been fielded by the German army in Eastern Europe.
The GEREON is a compact, low-shape tracked drone which can be employed for carrying supplies or for casualty evacuation, with a cargo capacity of up to 500 kg. On a single charge, the drone can work for up to 72 hours and it can venture up to 40 km away from its operator leveraging an Artificial Intelligence core known as MITHRA OS.
MITHRA is also the key AI system that enables the transformation of existing, legacy vehicles into uncrewed, networked assets that can be fitted with scalable AI, modular software, and advanced sensors.
The GEREON RCS’s modularity can also be exploited to fit various sensors or other payloads including tethered UAVs for elevated surveillance.
In Britain, the British Army has started experimenting with the GEREON on Salisbury Plain, in particular in the hands of the 1st Queen’s Dragoon Guards Regiment, a Light Cavalry formation with a reconnaissance and target acquisition mission.
The Army is considering how to tailor the GEREON to its requirements but no contract has yet been signed to buy them. The British Army has a notional program for Robotic Platoon Vehicles which has seen various types tested and trialled over the last several years, with the Rheinmetall MISSION MASTER emerging as the main candidate, acquired in cargo carrying, ISR and Armed configurations and employed in multiple exercises including the last Project CONVERGENCE Capstone 5 event at Fort Irwin in the US during April.
ARX says that more than ten different mission payloads have already been cleared and are “click-and-go” for the GEREON, including an integrated Acoustic Sensor Module to detect the sources of enemy fire.
ARX has secured funding from the NATO Innovation Fund, a venture capital fund operated by the alliance to boost the development of defence technology.
In the UK, as part of the ongoing Defence Review, the MOD has been instructed to spend “at least” 10% of its equipment budget on “novel technologies” with a big focus on AI and drones.
Ongoing activities that could end up involving GEREON include Project MORRIGHAN, a project that sees 4 companies under contract to demonstrate an interchangeable “cargo bed” that can be shared by Ground and Air drones to shuttle loads on the battlefield and to carry out “in extremis” casualty evacuation.
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