Overland AI lands first-ever US military ground autonomy production contract worth $20M

Speaker 2: Oh, great. Thanks for having me on, guys. It's it's really exciting to be here. Yes. Great to have you. We're very excited. Can you reintroduce the product and then take us through the latest news and the contract that you just signed?

Speaker 3: Yeah. Sure. So good news is I'm working here out of our factory in Seattle. So you can actually see the product that we have. Right? So we're building autonomous ground vehicles for defense. Basically, think about that as like robots for the battlefield. Yeah. So do you guys wanna see it? Absolutely. Absolutely. Walk through it a little. Give us a tour. So so here's here's one of them. This is our our Ultra product. So I mean, you kind of see the top part of it. Yeah. It's a large off road ground vehicle. You've got sensors in the front. So there's stereo cameras and LIDAR. Mhmm. You've got these big, big wheels here and and long travel suspension. Down here is a payload deck, so you can think about putting, you know, big payloads on the vehicle. Mhmm. Right in here, there's onboard power. There's compute down below the deck. Comms in the back. So that gives you just a a brief overview of one of the things that we're building. And then, you know, you asked about the contract, and we're super excited. So we're the first ground autonomy provider to get a production contract, with the US military. $20,000,000

Speaker 2: contract with What the US Marine

Speaker 3: the hell time is that?

Speaker 2: Oh, that's fantastic. That I you're thinking about I'm thinking that truck needs a gun. What what does the payload look like on there? It seems very modular. It seems like you can put a lot of different equipment on that. Is that something that's delegated to the Marine Corps? They decide they partner with other primes, or or do you have, like, other relationships where you can bring the configuration to them?

Speaker 3: So we've put 30 payloads, 30 different payloads on these vehicles. It's designed to be modular. You can see that there's L track down here that makes it really easy to attach things. Sure. So this is everything from, kinetic payloads, like remote weapon stations, drones, EW. Sure. So it depends on what the the customer wants. We can help them integrate anything onto onto this vehicle.

Speaker 1: Dogs as a form factor. There's been a bunch of sort of creepy robot dogs. Or actual dogs. Well, we should get into real dogs. Yeah. But there's been a bunch of videos circulating recently. There was one maybe a week ago of of a robotic dog, and it seemed like they had solved, like, some of the recoil challenges. Do you think that's a like, how are you thinking about that form factor? Obviously, you guys are you're focused on something else, but I'm sure you understand the trade offs of both. I I can imagine, like, your product is much better for high range, know, situations where you need a lot of range. But but how do you think about it?

Speaker 3: Yeah. So so one of the reasons why we love this form factor is that it's first of all, large enough to put a serious payload on it. It can handle one to 2,000 pounds depending on what the configuration is. It's got wheels, so, you know, it has really good use of energy. Can drive it a 100 miles. So robot dogs are really cool too. So before I started Overland AI, was a professor running a lab where we worked on machine learning and robotics, and we had a bunch of robotic dogs in in the lab, and they're they're fun to work on. But I think wheeled vehicles are really the place where we can get, you know, the

Speaker 2: most You're saying wheel is underrated and it doesn't need to be reinvented.

Speaker 3: That's Which what I'm is crazy. Yeah. I mean, so not only do you not need to reinvent a wheel, I mean, you have squishy tires, you can do things like drive up and down stairs and and do all sorts of stuff. So I never thought about how simple that is. You can just drive up the stairs if your tires are big enough. How big are the tires on the That's right. On that truck? I I think these are, like, 38 inch. So so pretty big. 30 eights. That's fantastic.

Speaker 2: I love it. What does the actual manufacturing process look like? Obviously, you're very well funded company, dollars 100,000,000 round recently. At the same time, there's probably a lot of experimentation, a lot of putting different parts of the supply chain together, a lot of modularity. So how hand built are these? What does the automation story over the future look like?

Speaker 3: So the ultra vehicle like this one is actually based on a Polaris RZR chassis and and drivetrain. Okay. So we get that from Polaris and then we upgrade the suspension. You can actually see a great view of that here. Got it. We pull out the the seats. We just add this flat payload deck. Yeah. And, you know, we do all the work to add the compute and the sensors and and wiring power, all all of that kind of stuff. So Yeah. We pull all that together, in our factory here. We're also very field forward. So we we test these out in the fields, all the time. You know, we're in the the field every single day Yep. Working on the, you know, the software, the autonomy. And I think one thing which is really really important about these systems is that this is a completely autonomous robotic system. Right? Like it has sensors that allow it to perceive the environment, plan through the environment, control it so that a user can just tell it where it wants it to go, what payload to execute. It's not you know, it doesn't have to be teleoperated.

Speaker 2: You know, a single user can control multiple vehicles. It's one of the things which is really cool about this tech. I imagine there's, like, very high demand for both teleop and full autonomous mode though, right? People want to be able to port in for a particular mission and then also be able to just try and draw waypoints on a map?

Speaker 3: So one of the things that I think we see is when people first start to use a vehicle like this, they're like, oh, like I want to teleop it and I'll be able to precisely control where it goes. But they quickly realize that you can actually just tell it where to go on the map, tell it, you know, what orientation you want it to be in, and it will just go there and do it. And so, it's actually safer, more efficient, and allows you to get like much more force multiplication if the operator just relies on the autonomy to get it there. And so what we've seen is is war fighters really embracing that and

Speaker 2: starting to experiment much more with that. So, we think autonomy really is the the future. Any plans make a dual use version for Malibu? If you got a bunch of surfboards, you wanna get them down to the beach, you load them up and say, hey. I'll meet you there in five minutes. Some natural light. Some natural light.

Speaker 3: I mean, sounds it sounds awesome. We are we are actually, dual use. We are using this for things like wildland firefighting and other things. So who knows? I mean, may maybe pretty soon, we'll be able to you know, get you guys one. Yeah. The day party market. The Amman

Speaker 2: taking you around the the hotel property. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Fantastic.