The self-driving vehicle is now a reachable asset for travelers in major American cities, after a ton of researching and testing. The Army, however, has it own need for the autonomous vehicles. To help procure the complicated technology, the Army turned to the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) as a facilitator with folks from the industry side that can help. To learn more, Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked to David Michelson, a project manager with DIU.
Interview Transcript:
David Michelson So as part of what we’re looking to do at the Defense Innovation Unit, we want to accelerate the adoption of commercial technology for the Department of Defense. And it’s no secret that private industry has invested billions and billions of dollars into the autonomous vehicle space. And there’s a lot of technology and some really innovative ideas out there that the department could benefit from. So as we were talking to a bunch of our [Department of Defense (DoD)] partners, we ended up making connections with the Robotic Combat Vehicle Office out of Detroit Arsenal. We learned that they had a pretty compelling problem on the software side for their efforts and that we could help out and really open up the aperture of the vendors that could compete. Get some new companies, some compelling, nontraditional defense companies and some first timers really, that haven’t done business with the Department of Defense before to come in and say, hey, we have something that’s compelling, unique, innovative, and we think that we could solve a big problem for the Army. So those conversations happened for quite a while as we strategize, thought about it. That’s really where the match came in. And I think that DIU’s unique position in the ecosystem and connections to the commercial space or something that the Army was excited to leverage and we’re proud to partner with them.
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