AUSA 2026: Textron to market standalone ‘CoreMotion' robotic control package

Ripsaw M5 and M3 (Textron Systems )

Textron is now offering a version of its robotic control architecture, developed through its Ripsaw series of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), as a vehicle-independent kit designed to help convert existing crewed vehicles into optionally crewed/uncrewed platforms.

The company revealed its CoreMotion robotic control package on 12 October at the Association of the United States Army's annual symposium in Washington, DC.

“We see that there are several opportunities emerging for this”, including US Army efforts to buy new drive-by-wire kits for forthcoming and legacy vehicles, Sara Willett, vice-president for uncrewed air and land systems at Textron, told Janes ahead of the symposium.

CoreMotion is a “middle-layer” vehicle-control and execution system, intended to translate commands from humans or autonomy software into commands for vehicle hardware and subsystems, Textron said in a statement.

Beyond passing signals to actuators, as many traditional drive-by-wire kits do, CoreMotion “interprets kind of that command intent, whether that comes from a human operator or from an autonomy stack, and then translates that into predictable, repeatable motions”, Willett told Janes.

Textron said CoreMotion connects vehicle subsystems, robotic controls, autonomous navigation software, and mission payloads, and coordinates functions such as steering, braking, and power distribution.

There is hardware and software associated with the kit, including “computers, electronics, actuators, software, along with kind of your traditional drive-by-wire kit, [such as] wiring brackets needed to connect and secure each of those components together”, Willett said.

It is intended both for purpose-built robotic vehicles and for retrofitting existing crewed vehicles for robotic operation, the company said.