Navy League 2025: L3Harris eyes MVP variant for AMORPHOUS

US sailors retrieve a Mk 18 Mod 2 unmanned underwater vehicle during a transit through the Northern Mariana Islands. (US Navy)

L3Harris is looking to mature its new drone swarm command-and-control (C2) technology into a minimum viable product (MVP) by August 2025.

Programme officials at the company, in conjunction with the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), have been developing prototype variants of the Autonomous Multi-domain Operations Resiliency Platform for Heterogeneous Unmanned Swarms (AMORPHOUS) programme.

“The current [development] phase of the programme was contracted through August of this year, at which point we would ... release a minimum viable capability” with follow-on MVP joint development efforts with DIU expected to take place afterwards, said Jon Rambeau, president of Integrated Mission Systems at L3Harris, during a briefing ahead of the Navy League Sea-Air-Space 2025 conference, which started on 7 April.

“I would hope at that point, we would see the services start to pick up the [MVP] and start to ... look at fielding that, at least on a limited basis,” Rambeau said.

“Think of AMORPHOUS as an orchestra conductor,” Rambeau explained. “If you were to have hundreds or thousands of surface, subsurface, [and] airborne assets you wanted to control ... with very few operators, maybe even a single operator, [the programme] is designed to provide that capability,” he said.

He declined to comment on what specific C2 capability an MVP variant of the AMORPHOUS system would include, but noted programme officials expect “by the time we get through the contract in the August timeframe ... we would have proven that we can scale [the system] to north of 100 [autonomous] assets, controlled across multiple domains”.