Australian-made Warfighter platform passes another milestone

The team developing the Warfighter UGV (unmanned ground vehicle) has passed another milestone, demonstrating “the lightest combat UGV able to achieve effective fire from a 50cal at 1km range.”

The Warfighter is half the weight of any previous UGV achieving that calibre fire at a 1 kilometre range, Cyborg Dynamics Engineering announced in a statement. Cyborg Dynamics, BIA5 and Electro Optic Systems are partnered on the project, which uses a chassis “descended from BIA5’s ATR” and makes use of EOS’s lightweight R150 remote weapons system.

“The patented double acting suspension from BIA5 combined with the lightweight R150 produces instantaneous, high impulse, recoil damping on a very light platform,” said Cyborg Dynamics CEO Stephen Bornstein in a statement.

“This means that even for large weapons systems, the barrel is back on target very fast for both static and moving shoots”

The smaller size provides benefits such as being harder to detect and target on the battlefield, lower costs, and reduced supply chain overhead.

The project uses content from 20 local suppliers, said Cyborg Dynamics, through “an almost entirely sovereign supply chain.” It added that upcoming steps on the project would further “autonomy, human machine interface and payload systems.”

Cyborg Dynamics was founded by Bornstein, the 2017 Australian Young Engineer of the Year, and is a specialist in delivering high-tech projects in simulation, robotics, defence and unmanned systems.

Picture: Cyborg Dynamics Engineering

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