The Army’s RCV competition took a concrete step forward this fall when the service selected four teams to build platform prototypes for Phase I: McQ (Team HDT), Textron Systems (Team RIPSAW), General Dynamics Land Systems, and Oshkosh Defense. Each award is a Phase I rapid prototyping agreement that funds two platform vehicles to support platform mobility testing and a Soldier touchpoint slated for delivery in 2024.

That milestone is the baseline you should use to judge industry noise versus real progress. The Army explicitly framed this next phase as a way to mature platform designs and get soldiers under the controls and on the decks — not as a procurement decision yet. The intent is to evaluate mobility, transportability, remote control and modularity before picking a winner in later phases.

Parallel to the contractor awards, Army leadership signaled a conceptual shift that matters for how these prototypes are being judged. Program leadership has moved away from three distinct size classes toward a single, modular chassis approach where mission is defined by payloads placed on a robot deck. That change came out of experimentation with surrogate systems during unit rotations and means the prototype competition will emphasize modularity and payload integration almost as much as raw vehicle performance.

What the four teams are bringing to that fight is worth a terse, practical look:

  • Textron Systems is offering a RIPSAW-derived entrant based on the M3 tech demonstrator. The company is pitching a proven robotic core, a configurable payload deck and an open architecture to make payload swaps and sensor upgrades straightforward. Textron has been explicit that their Phase I deliverable will be two RIPSAW M3 platform prototypes for Army testing.
  • General Dynamics Land Systems will deliver two TRX tracked robots. GD’s public materials emphasize a modular, hybrid-electric TRX with significant payload margin and exportable power to support sensors and electronic systems. They position TRX as a multi-role chassis built to accommodate different mission modules.
  • McQ, priming Team HDT, is fielding the WOLF-X, an 8x8 wheeled design HDT developed and tailored for RCV requirements. McQ’s announcement emphasizes mobility, transportability and an architecture intended to accept BAE Systems-provided armament and situational awareness packages.
  • Oshkosh’s entry was presented as an evolution of prior work and a modular solution integrating partner tech like Pratt Miller and QinetiQ. Oshkosh has highlighted soldier-centered design tradeoffs and demonstrated payload integrations at industry shows. (Oshkosh made its Phase I proposal public earlier in 2023 and exhibited RCV concepts at AUSA.)

Those announcements are the public-facing layer. On the technical floor, the real tests coming in 2024 will focus on four areas where prototypes so often fail to live up to marketing claims: 1) Mobility and transportability. Can the platform actually keep pace with manned formations over relevant terrain and be moved within theater by current lift assets? Manufacturers promise transportability and high payload margins, but the Army will stress real-world cross-country mobility and the logistics tail required to sustain push operations. 2) Payload integration and MOSA. The single-chassis, multi-payload idea only works if the vehicle supports rapid, soldier-friendly swaps and if power, thermal and data buses are designed to handle future capabilities. Expect the Army to push hard on open architectures and standardized interfaces during the soldier touchpoint. 3) Command and control and the warrior-machine interface. Remote operation, latency, control ergonomics and the ability to rapidly understand what sensors on an RCV are telling you will make or break usefulness at company and battalion levels. The prototypes must show usable interfaces under operational stress. 4) Survivability versus cost. Prototypes will be dressed up with counter-UAS, remote weapon stations and electronic warfare packages during tests. But you cannot ignore the arithmetic: every added capability increases cost and complexity. The Army’s move to a modular chassis reflects a desire to avoid overbuilding a single-purpose expensive robot.

From a builder’s perspective, what I want to see during government testing is disciplined instrumentation and rigorous fault capture. Industry loves to show sensor fusion demos on smooth test courses and clear weather days. The Army needs transparent records from muddy, degraded-comms, nighttime and extended-duration runs. Those are the conditions that expose annoying but program-killing failure modes: thermal throttling, bus contention, software race conditions, and degradation of remote video feeds. None of those are sexy in a booth photo, but they are what kills fielded capability. (This is not speculation. It is how complex vehicle prototypes fail in the real world.)

The winners of Phase I will be the teams who not only deliver mobile, modular platforms on schedule but who also demonstrate a realistic integration path for the soldier. The real work begins when soldiers try to use a prototype in the kind of messy, unstructured environment that training units provide. The Army’s stated schedule gives teams until roughly August 2024 to get prototypes to government test sites and Soldier touchpoints.

A few blunt cautions before hype takes over the narrative. First, prototypes do not equal production. These Phase I awards are about maturation and soldier feedback, not fielding an RCV fleet. Second, autonomy and off-road behavior remain development challenges industry must demonstrate incrementally; the Army is judging not just what a vehicle can do in a curated demo but what it can sustain over time with maintainable logistics. Finally, the program’s shift to a single, payload-defined chassis is sensible, but it puts a premium on standards and commonality. If vendors keep proprietary stovepipes for sensors, power or control, the whole modular idea stalls.

What to watch in the coming months: timely delivery of the two platform prototypes from each team, the soldier touchpoint results (especially on the warrior-machine interface), and whether the Army’s experiments continue to prioritize modular payloads over single-role complexity. Those datapoints will tell you whether the RCV program is on a credible path toward a pragmatic, affordable unmanned capability or whether it risks getting bogged down in cost and complexity while drones get cheaper and more numerous.

In short, Phase I is the moment of truth for the promises industry has been making to the Army. Prototypes in testing will separate salesmanship from engineering. The teams who treat this as engineering first and marketing second will have the advantage when the Army asks which chassis can be sustained in the mud and rain of an actual brigade combat team mission.