Five companies have secured other transaction agreements ranging from $1 million to $25 million to develop prototypes of the U.S. Army’s Future Tactical Unmanned Aircraft System Increment 2.
The OTA awards are part of an industry competition seeking a new UAS platform for brigade combat teams to perform reconnaissance and surveillance work even in areas where GPS signals are corrupted, the service branch said Tuesday.
AeroVironment (Nasdaq: AVAV), Griffon Aerospace, Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC), Sierra Nevada Corp. and Texton Systems (NYSE: TXT) will compete in the rapid prototyping effort.
In August 2022, AeroVironment won an $8 million OTA to manufacture, test and deliver the Jump 20 UAS system to a team of soldiers as part of the FTUAS Increment 1 program.
The latest development competition has five phases slated to occur through 2025 and the branch said funds would depend on each project agreement holder’s progress.
Participants will put their FTUAS offerings through design reviews from the base period to option two periods.
Downselected vendors for the third option period will conduct flight demonstrations and undergo a third-party verification of their modular open systems approach.
For option four, the Army plans to procure four air vehicles along with mission and payload suites, ground control systems, on-the-move controllers and other items for the qualification test and operational assessment.
The service sought vendors capable of providing systems that are rapidly deployable, have runway independence and are capable of point takeoff and landing.
