The United States military is moving from experiment to expeditionary design. What was once a parade of isolated prototypes and laboratory demos is now being asked to prove itself at formation scale. In 2024 that change took a concrete form: the Army and its industry partners advanced rapid-prototype efforts intended to equip maneuver brigades with mission-tailored ground robots and unmanned combat vehicles.
Two connected strands explain this shift. First, the service is recalibrating force design to include dedicated Robotic and Autonomous Systems platoons embedded inside maneuver brigades. Those units are not a thought experiment; senior leaders have proposed standing RAS platoons for armored brigades and are experimenting now with how many such sub-units a brigade needs and what mix of platforms they should operate. The implication is obvious: if brigades are to accept robotic cohorts as standard, industry must deliver prototypes that meet real tactical, sustainment, and command-and-control requirements.
Second, the Robotic Combat Vehicle program and related rapid-prototype pathways have matured into selection and down-select phases through 2023 and 2024. Major contractors have responded to Requests for Prototype Proposal and delivered early-build platforms intended for soldier touchpoints and mobility testing. Those efforts signal the Army’s intention to move beyond demonstrations and toward production-representative prototypes that could be integrated at the brigade level. This is not an abstract procurement; it is an attempt to produce an object that will live inside a formation and be judged by soldiers under stress.
Field experiments have already furnished lessons that must shape prototype requirements. Project Convergence Capstone experiments in 2024 placed ground robots alongside aerial systems in combined human-machine tasking. Soldiers ran SMET-type mules and quadrupeds in scenarios that tested autonomy constraints, network latency, and the human interfaces that turn a set of vehicles into a coordinated team. Those trials emphasized that the problem is not only building a vehicle but building an integrated package of autonomy software, communications, user interface, logistics and doctrine.
The engineering challenges are familiar to anyone who builds mobile autonomy. Ground robots must operate in cluttered, GPS-challenged environments; they must navigate dynamic obstacles and avoid becoming a maintenance burden. Quadrupeds and wheeled UGVs have different strengths, and prototypes must be judged against the tasks brigades will actually perform - reconnaissance, casualty evacuation, resupply, force protection, or direct fire - rather than against marketing brochures. The Army’s approach of iterative soldier touchpoints is therefore correct. It privileges operational realism over polished demos.
Yet technological limits are not the only bottleneck. Communications and spectrum constraints remain central. Vehicles that move faster than the network can support produce stale situational awareness, which in turn forces operators to slow platforms or accept greater autonomy. That trade-off has doctrinal consequences: are robots to be teleoperated every time, or allowed higher levels of autonomy and associated risk? The procurement of brigade-grade prototypes must therefore include clear requirements for human supervision, graceful degradation, and fail-safe behaviors.
There is also the question of attritability and cost. A formation that fields dozens or hundreds of robots will need systems that are inexpensive enough to be treated as expendable in certain missions, and robust enough to survive the logistical tail of an operational theater. Prototype solicitations and OTAs in 2023-2024 explicitly sought modular, payload-agnostic platforms that could accept different mission kits. That modularity is a pragmatic answer to an important moral and strategic dilemma: we can choose between extremely high-cost single-purpose robots or cheaper, attritable machines that let humans avoid danger by accepting a calibrated material loss. Either choice carries consequences for doctrine and industrial base design.
Ethics and accountability must ride alongside technical progress. Embedding robotic systems inside a brigade amplifies questions of command responsibility, rules of engagement, and escalation control. A brigade commander who deploys a team of semi-autonomous systems needs transparent decision thresholds, predictable failure modes, and logging sufficient to audit actions after the fact. Prototype demonstrations that ignore these governance features will produce hardware that is tactically interesting but operationally unusable. The procurement process must therefore treat autonomy behavior and human-machine interfaces as first-class requirements, not secondary add-ons.
Finally, realism in experimentation must persist. The right path is iterative and soldier-led: field small batches, learn quickly, and modify both platforms and doctrine in parallel. The Army’s recent procurement posture - moving RCVs through prototype phases while experimenting with RAS platoons at the unit level - follows that logic. If the service and industry sustain honest soldier feedback loops, the next generation of prototypes will be less a spectacle and more a tool a brigade can deploy, sustain, and fight with. The alternative is to permit a proliferation of incompatible, expensive curiosities that enrich vendors but not warfighters.
In sum, ‘ground robot brigade prototypes sought’ is not merely a procurement headline. It marks a doctrinal inflection point where machines begin to be treated as members of formations rather than laboratory artefacts. The technical and ethical hurdles are significant, but they are not insurmountable provided requirements remain tethered to soldier realities and accountability is engineered into every level of the system. The coming years will show whether prototypes become useful brigade assets or expensive museum pieces in waiting.