How Forterra Is Enabling Modular Military Vehicle Autonomy

March 1, 2026

During the 2025 Association of the United States Army (AUSA) annual meeting and exhibition, Forterra announced several major defense industry vehicle partnerships and introduced four new integrated modules designed to enable autonomy for military vehicles, communications, and more.

Headquartered in Clarksburg, Maryland, Forterra develops autonomous mission systems for specific defense applications, including robotics and self-driving vehicles. The company has a new partnership with BAE Systems that will rapidly prototype an autonomous Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV). Separately, Forterra has also collaborated with Oshkosh Defense and Raytheon to develop the “DeepFires” autonomous vehicle launcher technology.

Forterra’s new modules can enable autonomy for a wide variety of applications. (Image: Forterra)

What are autonomy-enabling modules, and what type of autonomous applications is Forterra enabling with these new modules? Check out some of our Q&A session with Patrick Acox, Forterra Vice President of Defense Growth, during his appearance on the Aerospace & Defense Technology podcast to answer these questions and more.

Aerospace & Defense Technology (A&DT): Forterra unveiled its new integrated mission modules that are designed to transform logistics, mobility, and interoperability for warfighters. Can you explain to our audience what exactly are these mission modules, how do they work, and what will they provide for warfighters?

Patrick Acox: We introduced four integrated modules, AutoDrive, TerraLink, OASIS and Vektor. We’re known for self-driving software, and that self-driving software runs on pretty highly capable edge computing, that’s auto-drive. With the combination of that edge compute and the self-driving software auto-drive, we’re able to either go as a retrofit onto existing vehicles or on production lines, like in the case of rogue fires for the Marine Corps, to really build that self-driving, self-moving capability. And then you also have the edge compute that you can go host a bunch of other services in there. That’s AutoDrive.

BAE Systems and Forterra recently announced they are collaborating to rapidly prototype an autonomous Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV).

Then we have Oasis. So being in the space for a long period of time, we found is the integration framework is actually pretty challenging, right? There’s always one more standard to go comply with. And when we think about the integration aspect, both from an internal perspective and also in order to deliver it out to external partners or customers, it’s a tool set that allows them to do this themselves. That’s Oasis.

Then with Vector, we know there are tons of folks in aerospace and defense that operate across link and transport layers. The things that we do really well are, hey, we use many different radios, many different kinds of communication in order to pull for data across a battlefield. Some of that data needs to come in low latency and low bandwidth. So think robots talking to robots. They get to exchange ones and zeros and share information in a way that us as humans won’t be able to understand. Because we like context, we like full motion video, we like audio, we like all of these things to understand our surroundings. That can get broken down to a much more efficient way of communicating.

Terralink, this is how people interact with robots and with these systems. Think about diagnostics coming off, to how do you command and control platforms, to how do you get platforms to go conduct sequences of missions. This is the module that allows end users and connected devices to work from the same live data picture.

A&DT: When you think about these modules from an end user perspective, what are some of the platforms you can see these modules being integrated into? For example, ground vehicles, drones, or others?

Acox: The bottom line is on their own, they’re all useful, but when put together, they provide a network effect. And so when I think about edge compute, edge compute can be a little bit more expensive than maybe what you want to put on a $500 drone, probably not the best area for that.

Forterra’s modules have been leveraged to enable autonomy across a wide variety of platforms, including the uncrewed vehicle shown here. (Image: Forterra)

The OEM is going to run there. But being able to go integrate something like Vector to handle how you communicate with that drone or back into many drones, that’s the type of feature these modules were designed for.

With Terralink, as we think about envisioning how you control or h ow you interact with a lot of different drones and visualize that data, there’s another appealing end user application. You’re probably not going to tackle the entirety of JADC2 with these modules. But as it comes to understanding how robots are interacting on battle space, for example, they can be super worthwhile.

A&DT: Separately from the modules Forterra also collaborated with Oshkosh and Raytheon to display two DeepFires Autonomous Launcher prototypes during AUSA. In Forterra’s announcement about the DeepFires platform, Chris Seifert, Forterra’s head of Autonomous Strike, describes it as more than a launcher and also stated that it is a generational step up in force projection with masked fires. Can you just explain to our audience what is the DeepFires platform, what is Forterra providing for it, and what aspects of it make it sort of a generational leap in this area?

Acox: Yes, we’re very excited to work with Raytheon and Oshkosh. The base chassis for this Autonomous Launcher platform is an FMTV A2 — OshKosh’s FAMILY OF MEDIUM TACTICAL VEHICLES — which is prolific in the fleet. So we’re starting with a core concept which has a great heritage and pretty good supply chain. Then we look at, hey, autodrives. So going back to that edge compute, and the autonomy software going on to that, some of the comms aspects, some of the UI, and this operates essentially the autonomous control in contested environments.

And then in terms of like why is it a generational step up? I think there’s a narrative that, hey, people are not important. People can be replaced. I think the better way to look at this is there is a troop to task ratio that goes on, which really puts a demand on the forces deploying. And we look at this as a way, how does a battery fire at the capability of a battalion? How are things more than just the sum of their parts?

And so that capability and that collaboration, we see basically a method to provide better deliveries, faster capabilities, smarter weapon systems for war fighters.

A&DT: You also recently announced another partnership with another major industry company that our audience will definitely be familiar with, BAE Systems, to rapidly prototype a self-driving version of the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle or AMPV with a new capability kit. What types of modifications need to be made to AMPV to create the autonomous prototype you’re working on? And also, can you tell us what type of military applications you could see the autonomous version of AMPV supporting?

Acox: There are a few things to do on actuated controls. So if you think about this, like how am I applying power or steering remotely? And BAE Systems is a phenomenal build from the ground up. So there are some things to get added in there, really on how different controls go on the actuated level. And then going up into the edge compute aspect, where we’re deploying auto drive onto it, along with self-driving software.

We’ll probably be doing some things around communications. Again, how do robots talk to robots? And as we look at the military applications, I think one of the easy ones to go to is always logistics.

If you don’t have people in here and you have to keep up with formations, having extra beams, bullets, and band-aids in the back of this are helpful. The other aspect we look at is formation-based layer protection. These are able to operate with different kinds of payloads to support the units they can actually keep up with as they go across pretty challenging ground and terrain.

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