Overland AI has secured a production contract for autonomous ground vehicles that will power the Marine Air Defense Integrated Systems, the company announced Monday.
According to a press release, the $20 million deal was advanced by the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) initiative, led by the Pentagon’s Research and Engineering Directorate.
During a media roundtable, Byron Boots, co-founder and CEO of Overland AI, told DefenseScoop that the first deliveries of the AGVs are expected to begin approximately nine months after the contract is awarded. He declined to say exactly how many vehicles will be provided under the contract, but said it will be “more than a dozen.”
Boots said the company’s AGVs are not currently intended to replace the Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, which are part of the Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS) architecture.
MADIS is designed as a maneuverable device that can detect and defeat enemy drones and manned aircraft. It consists of two JLTVs carrying sensors and weapons such as 30mm cannons, Stinger missiles and electronic warfare devices.
Overland AI’s autonomous ground vehicle is “not intended to replace the JLTV,” Boots told DefenseScoop. “We start with integration [company’s autonomous ground] vehicle into the system, thereby providing a resupply option for the other vehicles that are part of the system. And maybe we’ll build on it from there, but that’s how the program starts.”
According to the Pentagon, the additional $20 million transaction agreement includes not only the hardware for the autonomous UGVs, but also the contractor’s OverWatch and OverDrive software, spare parts and services.
OverDrive is an autonomy stack and OverWatch is a command and control system.
“I would like to continue to differentiate between an unmanned ground vehicle and an autonomous ground vehicle,” Boots told reporters. “Autonomous ground vehicles are unmanned, but also have software, sensors and computing power on board that allow them to move autonomously through the terrain and the battlefield. And that has several advantages. First, they are less vulnerable to contentious communications and can continue to operate even if connectivity is lost. And second, it really allows for scaling. A single operator can operate multiple vehicles if each of those vehicles has autonomous capabilities. So that’s how we think about it.”
Boots said the AGV the company will provide to the Marine Corps is “fully autonomous,” explaining that “it can sense the environment, represent it, plan through it, and control the vehicle so you can tell it where to go and it will make the decisions on board to get there.”
A human operator can take control of the system if they want, he noted.
He described the platform as a “lightweight” vehicle but declined to provide specifications or disclose payload capacity.
“We expect they will initially be used for resupply, but believe there will be many different possible use cases and ways to integrate this vehicle into the program,” Boots said.
According to Boots, the company has already integrated around 30 payloads into its autonomous ground vehicles.
“You can put pretty much anything you want into these vehicles [size, weight and power] Capacity,” he said. “Obviously intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, use for resupply.” … We have also brought on board tethered drones and other types of payloads. So the payload applications here are truly limitless. You can imagine what you can do with a vehicle like this.”
He pointed to the war between Ukraine and Russia as an example of the utility and proliferation of this type of military technology.
“I think there’s a revolution in land warfare taking place in Ukraine, and the use of unmanned ground vehicles is part of that story. And the way we look at it is that unmanned vehicles really provide soldiers … and Marines with safety and distance, the ability to remove a human being from a point of contact to protect them during deployment,” Boots said.
Overland AI “is seeing extremely high demand from U.S. operational units looking to integrate this technology into their operational concepts,” he told reporters.
“What we’re really excited about here is the fact that we’re at a point where the U.S. military is really seeing the utility of such vehicles and has moved from experimentation and prototyping to production contracts, and we’re excited to be leading the way there,” he said.
Table of Contents
Written by Jon Harper
Jon Harper is Editor-in-Chief of DefenseScoop. He leads an award-winning team of journalists who provide breaking news and in-depth analysis of military technology and the way it influences the way the Department of Defense operates and modernizes. You can also follow him on X: @Jon_Harper_
https://defensescoop.com/2026/06/29/autonomous-ground-vehicle-marine-corps-overland-ai-contract/
