History of the MARCbot and LVUSS

This site was originally created in Spring 2005 to provide support and contact information for the MARCbot. The MARCbot itself was designed as a remote observation platform to provide standoff from potential IEDs for soldiers conducting route recon and convoys, whereas the LVUSS was designed later to address vehicle undercarriage inspection in rough terrain.

The robots available to the military at the time of development were too expensive to be widely distributed to soldiers in need. The MARCbot and LVUSS were intended as fully functional and purpose built alternatives.

For remote IED Sweeps, the solution became the MARCbot: an RC car body with a raisable camera. The REF funded versions of the MARCbot as an appropriate inspection solution to soldiers downrange. Numerous in-theater tests resulted in a robust, reliable, and useful tool in the MARCbot IV.

For vehicle undercarriage inspection, developement with soldiers in theater resulted in the LVUSS, a unique split-body desgn capable of handling both extremely rough terrain and inspection under low riding vehicles.

The design of the MARCbot and LVUSS have followed four new philosophies in military robotics:

A robot is only really good at one thing. Try to make a robot do multiple tasks (e.g. IED recon and MOUT exercises) and it will be mediocre at all of them. While many military robot designers seek some sort of robotic holy grail in a do-it-all platform, the MARCbot and LVUSS were designed to simply inspect suspicious items downrange.
The military owns what the military funds. Since the REF paid for the MARCbot, the US Government has free and open license for the design. Thus, the Army is not beholden to a particular company for manufactuing, upgrades, or repairs. This prevents any one company from being a required sole source supplier. While that may sound like common sense, it has NOT been the norm with all the other robotic development for which the US has paid.
Common sense logistics and repair support dictates using standard military batteries. Proprietary battery and charging systems on other military robots has plagued their usage. We refused to use special batteries, making one of the design requirements use of the rechargeable "5590" style battery. For the MARCbot, both the robot and the controller use either the BB-2590 (NSN 6140-01-490-4316) or BB-390 (NSN 6140-01-490-4317) batteries. The unique split-body design of the LVUSS required use of the BB-2847 (NSN 6140-01-493-8092), proving once again that proprietary batteries are not needed even in unique development projects.
Capabilities and requirements are dictated by soldiers with direct involvement in the mission. For nearly a year and a half, field engineers in OIF and OEF worked directly with soldiers performing combat missions to determine the design requirements for the robots.