The U.S. Army has awarded contracts with a combined total of $354 million to Anduril Industries and Rivet Industries to develop and deliver new warfighter capabilities as part of the Soldier Borne Mission Command, or SBMC, program.
Anduril received a $159 million contract, while Rivet executed a $195 million deal for the SBMC, the companies said in separate press releases.
Formerly known as the next-generation Integrated Visual Augmented System, or IVAS, the SBMC is intended to create a day/night situational awareness and mission command platform for the Army. The technology envisioned must have backwards compatibility with the Android Tactical Assault Kit, or ATAK, according to a request for solutions posted on SAM.gov in April.
Anduril’s SBMC Contract Details
Under the Army award, Anduril will build an initial prototype of its proposed night vision and mixed reality system for the SBMC.
The helmet-mounted technology combines day, night and thermal imagery with real-time battlefield intelligence to provide warfighters with a unified picture of the battlefield in a single device.
“You want to know where you can stand to not get blown up,” he continued. “There’s a lot … stuff like that, beyond also things like night vision. You want to be able to do stuff like control drones, control loitering munitions, just anything that before you would have been using a cell phone or a handheld controller or even a smart watch or even a dedicated laptop for, you want to be able to … use this device for,” Anduril founder Palmer Luckey said in a teleconference as reported by DefenseScoop. “And then the last category is maybe the most interesting. There’s a lot of equipment that has displays, optics and interfaces that I can now replace almost entirely with my wearable display.”
Anduril worked on the mixed reality system in partnership with Meta, Qualcomm Technologies, OSI and Gentex Corp.
Rivet’s Agreement With the Army
Under its agreement with the Army, Rivet will support fielding of the SBMC systems with soldiers to ensure the platform’s adaptability and extensibility to meet evolving threats.
The company said it “assembled the most qualified, multidisciplinary team” for the effort.
