Army Max
 

VIRGINIA BEACH — The remote-controlled robot looks like an off-the-shelf monster truck on steroids. It climbs street curbs with ease, hurdles speed bumps, hits 35 mph and runs for hours on a single battery charge.

But this high-tech machine, with a price tag of nearly $10,000, is no plaything, says its maker, Applied Marine Technology Inc.

It’s for deadly serious business.

Applied Marine Technology, known as AMTI, is a small, but growing, defense and homeland security contractor based in a suburban business park near Lynnhaven Mall.

The latest version of the company ’s rugged robots, outfitted with monitoring cameras, may soon be prowling the streets of Baghdad with an earlier model to help U.S. military forces find and destroy roadside bombs planted by insurgents.

The homemade bombs, known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, are the leading cause of death and injuries of American troops in Iraq. They are a growing problem in Afghanistan.

Defeating these devices has become a top priority at the Pentagon, which has formed an agency with a $3.5 billion budget to counter the threat, said Christine DeVries, spokeswoman for the military’s new Joint IED Defeat Organization.

Since Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched in March 2003, improvised explosive devices have killed nearly 1,000 U.S. troops.
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In Iraq, U.S. and coalition forces currently face about 1,000 attacks a month from improvised explosive devices, said Capt. Ryan Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command. They account for about two-thirds of U.S. military injuries and deaths, he said.

DeVries cited progress, though: While the number of IED attacks has tripled the past two years, the number of casualties has leveled off.

“We find and render useless about half of the IEDs,” she said.

The number of U.S. military deaths caused by the devices in Iraq more than doubled in 2005 over 2004, to 408 from 189, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. Through Sept. 4 of this year, the devices had killed 241.

Support from industry, DeVries said, “will be critical to winning this fight.”

Now, the nation’s top weapons manufacturers and dozens of smaller companies nationwide, including AMTI, are scrambling to produce solutions – and tap into a potentially lucrative market.

In 2005 alone, the private sector submitted more than 1,000 proposals, DeVries said. The Pentagon has provided financing to about 180 of them.

Industry, academic and government researchers are working on a range of solutions. Among them: devices to sniff out bomb-making chemicals and jammers to block radio signals, such as from cell phones or garage openers, which insurgents use to detonate explosive devices.

T hen there’s AMTI’s robot.

About three years ago, AMTI became one of the first private contractors to enlist in the effort to counter improvised explosive devices.

Founded in 1991, the company is heavy in retired military with backgrounds in special operations forces. Tapping into that expertise, the company has developed a niche in offering solutions in homeland security and the war on terror, working with military, law enforcement and industry clients.

For the past two years, it has made the Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s “Fantastic 50” list of the fastest-growing small businesses.

It now has more than 500 employees in six U.S. locations. This year, it expects to top $100 million in revenue for the first time.

In summer 2003, when roadside bombs began emerging as a weapon of choice for Iraqi insurgents, the government approached AMTI for advice, company officials said.

“We were at the time supporting another federal agency that worked with the Department of Defense, and DOD came to us and said, 'What would you do?’” said Rick Woolard, AMTI’s vice president of business development and a retired Navy SEAL commanding officer who once worked in the Pentagon as director for fighting terrorism.

AMTI’s solution: an off-the-shelf remote-controlled Traxxas truck, which retails for about $400.

The company’s engineers, who surveyed dozens of commercial products, found the Traxxas platform to be reliable. T hey replaced plastic parts with metal and aluminum, installed heavy-duty shocks, attached monitoring cameras and added a tray to carry explosives to blow up suspicious objects from several hundred feet away.

About 2,000 of those earlier robots, the R-421, have been purchased by the Defense Department and deployed by troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, company officials said.

“We sent people in-country and got constant feedback,” said Tim Pierce, AMTI’s division manager and a retired Navy commander involved in Explosive Ord nance Disposal.

Based on lessons from the field, AMTI plans to start production this month on the R-500 – the latest version in its “Seeker Series” robots.

The new version is beefier, has more than three times the range and is equipped with a detachable trailer to deliver explosives. Only about 20 percent of the robot is off-the-shelf stock parts.

“It’s far from a toy,” said Bud Fultz, vice president of AMTI’s Technical Solutions Group. “This can save lives. We know the predecessor robots have saved lives.”

The R-500 is equipped with two cameras – known in the trade as optical sensors – that allow troops to send the robot on reconnaissance and surveillance missions. The wireless robot has a range of about 1,000 feet, enabling its handlers to examine suspicious roadside objects or inspect buildings from a safe distance.

“Instead of outfitting a person in 100 pounds of gear in 120-degree heat, they can quickly deploy the robot to do an initial assessment,” Fultz said.

One of the cameras is fixed-view and forward-facing, used to drive the robot. The other is a pan-and-tilt camera that rotates 360 degrees horizontally and has a vertical scan of 180 degrees. Headlights and camera spotlights are attached for nighttime missions.

The robot’s operator can strap on optical goggles, called a “heads-up display,” to get a driver’s-seat view, or watch from a 6 -inch LCD monitor installed in a control box. The operator uses joysticks to control steering and the pan-tilt camera.

The power plant includes a customized lithium polymer battery, which recharges in about an hour and runs for several hours. A typical stock battery for wireless vehicles offers 10 to 20 minutes of drive time, said Bob Pervere, an AMTI CAD modeler and draftsman who helped develop the robot.

The older R-421, which sells for about $3,700, was designed to be disposable. However, t roops in the field – worried that they wouldn’t get replacements because of tight budgets – were jury-rigging the robots to avoid destroying them when blowing up roadside bombs. That included tying explosives to the end of a broom handle attached to the robot.

That led AMTI to design a detachable trailer to deploy explosives, making the R-500 reusable and a better buy, Fultz said – even though it has a higher up-front cost.

During a recent demonstration outside AMTI’s office, the robot splashed through puddles, zipped through a grass lawn and bounced over curbs.

“It’s not just a fair-weather robot,” Fultz said.

The robot is being marketed to the military, civilian law enforcement agencies, and first responders who deal with hazardous materials.

Besides the robots, the company has developed a range of training aids for military and civilian agencies that might encounter improvised explosive devices, including inert suicide vests and cutaway fake curbs that insurgents have used to hide IEDs.

“It’s a whole different war,” said Josh Van Haelen, AMTI’s product manager. “The enemy is walking around as a pregnant woman or children, or people sitting safely in their house and pressing a button.”