ARTICLE

May 2004

Marine Gladiator Charges Ahead

by Roxana Tiron

After splitting from a joint ground robotics program with the U.S. Army, the Marines decided to build their own unmanned combat vehicle, called the Gladiator.

“The Army chose FCS [future combat systems], and the Marines said they can’t wait that long. They needed something sooner, so we settled for much less capability,” said Marine Col. Terry Griffin, program manager for unmanned ground systems.

Carnegie Mellon and Lockheed Martin are competing to build the first Gladiator prototypes for the upcoming system development and demonstration phase, and both are demonstrating their vehicles at the Quantico Marine base, in Virginia.

The Office of Naval Research awarded the two companies the contract to develop the second phase of the program. The Carnegie Mellon consortium received $2.3 million, while Lockheed Martin received $2 million.

According to Larry Hennebeck, the Gladiator program manager at the Robotic-Systems Joint Project Office, the SDD phase is a few months away and a contract award for that part of the program is planned for this summer.

Gladiator could be in operation by 2008. At press time, Griffin was waiting for funds to be approved for the 2006 budget.

The Gladiator is supposed to provide the Marine Air-Ground Task Force with a remote-control operated semi-autonomous ground vehicle for remote reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition, as well as nuclear, biological and chemical reconnaissance obstacle breaching and firing capability.

Almost the size of an all-terrain vehicle, the Gladiator system will consist of a mobile and survivable ground-based mobile base unit, interchangeable mission modules, and a man-portable operator control unit. The OCU will allow the Marines to operate the Gladiator and will display, store and disseminate data. The Gladiator currently comes in two variants—wheels and tracks. These are concept validation models built in-house at the Aviation and Missile Command’s Research Development and Engineering Center, said Hennebeck.

The system will be able to perform both lethal and non-lethal direct fire missions, according to Griffin. For the lethal punch, it will use the M240 G Medium Machine Gun, M249 Squad Automatic weapon and Uzi sub-machine gun, while the non-lethal package includes the FN303, Light Vehicle Obscuration Smoke System and VENOM.

In hindsight, the power packed on the robot could have saved the Iraqi museums from the looting that followed the fall of Baghdad, said Griffin. A robot could be programmed to verbally warn crowds to stop the violence, then could fire non-lethal weapons and even lethal munitions when all else failed.

Gladiator concept validation models have been used operationally to develop tactics and procedures at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Camp Pendleton, Calif., and 29 Palms, Calif.

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