Milrem-led consortium receives EU grant to develop European standard unmanned ground system

The European Commission and Milrem Robotics signed a grant agreement during the week of 7 December for the development of the Integrated Modular Unmanned Ground System (iMUGS), the Estonian company announced in a press release on 14 December. Milrem leads a European consortium formed to work on the project under the EU's European Defence Industrial Development Programme (EDIDP). The other consortium members are GT Cyber Technologies, Safran Electronics & Defense, Nexter Systems, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, Diehl Defence, Bittium, Insta DefSec, (Un)Manned, dotOcean, Latvijas Mobilais Telefons, GMV Aerospace and Defence, and Belgium's Royal Military Academy.

The European Commission and Milrem Robotics have signed an EDIDP grant agreement for the development of iMUGS. (Milrem Robotics)

Milrem said the EUR32.6 million (USD39.7 million) grant would allow the consortium to begin work on the project. The requirements for iMUGS were set by project leader Estonia and six other countries: Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Latvia and Spain. The seven countries are contributing EUR2 million to the EUR32.6 million budget, according to Milrem.

The company said the project would involve the development of a modular and scalable architecture for hybrid manned-unmanned systems to standardise a Europe-wide ecosystem for aerial and ground platforms, command, control and communications, sensors, payloads, and algorithms. Among the areas to be addressed are increasing interoperability and situational awareness and speeding up decision making. Different payloads will be used on Milrem's existing THeMIS unmanned ground vehicle.

The first demonstration is planned for the second quarter of 2021 in Estonia, followed by others during participating member states’ military exercises or separate testing events.

Concepts for the use of combined manned-unmanned assets will be developed, taking into account the ethical aspects of robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems. Milrem said the system being developed would be under “meaningful human control”.