Right now, in Ottawa, there’s a vehicle sitting in a garage that can make the trip from Vancouver to Halifax and still have gas to spare. That vehicle could be many things: an ambulance, a personnel transport, perhaps a delivery truck. And, once Victoria-based InDro Robotics is finished working on it, it will be able to make that drive autonomously.
The vehicle is called Talos, a military-grade truck designed by former Formula 1 engineers from UK defence firm Fering. It looks like the lovechild of a Hummer and a dune buggy, hauls around four batteries and a diesel generator to fuel its extreme long-range driving capabilities, and also happens to look cool as hell. Its all-terrain wheels are roughly three feet high, which makes standing in front of the towering chassis a bit intimidating, even without the attached machine guns.
“[Talos] can actually power a 50-bed field hospital for 10 days on the power that it’s got on board.”
Philip Reece, Indro Robotics
Fering intended its vehicle platform to be more than a run-of-the-mill military truck, while InDro Robotics was looking for a mobile launch pad for the drones in its steadily increasing number of defence contracts. Fortunately, Fering chief commercial officer Gareth Reece and InDro founder and CEO Philip Reece are cousins; after chatting about their work, they realized they could help each other out.
“We took the bones of it, and took the designs of it, and brought it over here to Canada to build the Talos, to build one that was similar but more suited for the Canadian environment,” Philip told BetaKit in an interview. The Talos had to be improved to operate in colder temperatures, arctic conditions, and be remotely controlled or autonomously driven.
“Not just drive itself like a Tesla would, but drive itself without GPS, without communications, [and] to be able to assess on-road and off-road situations,” Philip stipulated.
If InDro is successful, the Talos could become the mainframe for Canada’s autonomous warfare capabilities.
BetaKit got an exclusive look at Talos and the work InDro Robotics is doing to turn it into a robot during a July site tour of the company’s offices and operations at Ottawa’s Area X.O. While the company is based in Victoria, Ottawa is “where the magic happens,” InDro’s head of R&D sales Luke Corbeth said while guiding BetaKit around the facility.
Area X.O is a nearly 2,000-acre research and development test site located in Ottawa’s west end. It sports advanced communications infrastructure and real-world urban and rural mobility infrastructure along 16km of test track, and plenty of other resources for robot testing. Corbeth likened it to “a skate park, but for robots.” As professional robot makers, Area X.O and InDro are a perfect match.
InDro has been making robots, particularly drones, since 2015. Philip wanted to stay in the industry after selling his small Vancouver-based airline, so he launched InDro as an “airline for drones.” The company slowly moved into developing the software side of robotics itself, started landing big clients like Nokia, Rogers, and Google, and then expanded into ground robots, which now make up 50 percent of its business. Today, you might see the 42-person company’s handiwork in the robot “dogs” roaming around Ottawa’s Science and Technology Museum, its robots monitoring utility stations, or its drones in the Canadian Armed Forces.
A mobile command centre
Talos is a strong vehicle on its own. But if InDro can turn it into a robot, that means it will take fewer resources to perform military operations or complete other kinds of missions. Its modular construction will make it easy to go on long hauls without putting soldiers’ or others’ lives at risk.
Imagine a forward-operating base needs supplies; just take out the seats, send Talos out packed with goods, keep an eye on it with your drone escort, and give it orders over the radio. For a search-and-rescue mission in a dangerous area, maybe the Arctic, instead of risking more lives and taking up room for survivors, send out an unmanned Talos to bring back as many people as possible. Even if Talos is manned, that’s an extra pair of eyes on its surroundings, instead of the road, and a pair of hands that can still take the wheel if needed.
All of this functionality will be built into InDro’s robotics interface, which keeps track of connected robots and allows for easy remote control. To demonstrate, Corbeth pulled out his laptop and an Xbox controller from a backpack, signed in, and started controlling one of InDro’s other robots out in the “skate park.” The whole process took only about a minute. While not a giant truck, weaving the medium-sized wheeled robot through the maze wasn’t difficult for a reporter with hundreds of Need for Speed hours under his belt.
And Talos can drive really far. Philip admitted that its 7,000-km range is probably “overkill,” but all that energy it’s hauling isn’t just for driving. The Talos is intended to act as a mobile command centre for a fleet of similar autonomous vehicles, as well as a giant mobile battery. That means other robots can live on the Talos, like an unmanned sidekick that can drive ahead to do recon, or a drone that flies above it to help it navigate difficult terrain without GPS. It can even power stationary operations when other options aren’t available.
“We can drive 1,000 kilometres, plug a mobile hospital, or whatever it turns out to be, into the Talos, and it can actually power a 50-bed field hospital for 10 days on the power that it’s got on board,” Philip said. “It’s like carrying this power plant around with you, which is super important to Canadian sovereignty, because it’s obviously so vast and there’s so few facilities [in the North].”
Those are lofty expectations, and InDro’s team in Ottawa has only been working on automating its prototype for about six months. On the tour, InDro engineering manager Joel Koscielski said they were still figuring out the drive-by-wire system, which essentially means the ability to replicate every kind of control input a human driver could make, but remotely. Having worked with InDro for a few years now, Koscielski has extensive experience with many ground-based vehicles, quadrupeds, and humanoid robotics, but the sheer size of Talos makes it a “bit of a different beast.”
“You need to be able to make sure that that vehicle knows how big it is, how to move it around the space, [and] what it can and can’t do,” Koscielski said. “Obviously, obstacle avoidance is a different challenge for something that large; it needs to know that it is that wide.”
Its size made Talos a popular visit during the CANSEC military trade show earlier this year, according to Koscielski, who said a “ton of people” wanted to sit in the cab when they saw it. Koscielski and Philip both attributed it to a familiarity with analogues like Hummers or Teslas, which become more interesting when confronted with its size and potential capabilities.
“[When] you’re up in the driving seat there, it sort of feels rough and tough, of course,” Philip said. “It’s definitely not a luxury vehicle, but you can imagine driving that across the dunes or across the Arctic.”
A new defence tech landscape
It’s become a different world for InDro since Canada started pushing more investment into defence in the name of securing its sovereignty. Last year, the government budgeted nearly $82 billion in commitments over five years, including provisions for the Defence Industrial Strategy to help wean the nation’s reliance on typical suppliers like the United States.
Philip has felt the difference. He said the company got its first defence contract around six years ago, which was a “slow and painful” process. Over the past two years, it’s changed completely.
Philip Reece,
“Sovereignty is not just owning the equipment; it’s about controlling the technology, the supply chain, the software, giving us the ability to evolve this technology as a whole for the market.”
Indro Robotics
“Before, what was taking three or four years, and you’re never sure whether it’s going to happen, is down to months now,” Philip said. “Defence budgets have got bigger, access to that funding has got quicker, and, what I really think is super valuable is we’re speaking to the end user now … we have meetings with operators who go out into the field [and] know what they need.”
As the military tries out Talos, its feedback will be fed right back into the vehicle’s development. According to Koscielski, Talos’s operational prototype will be ready by the end of the year; however, Philip said InDro has another, parallel version of the vehicle that’s about to undergo trials with the Canadian Armed Forces.
By taking this UK-made vehicle and giving it new life as a robot, Philip said InDro has been able to sell the Talos back to the UK, meaning his company has developed both a Canadian technology and an export story that’s generating value both for the military and the economy.
“Sovereignty is not just owning the equipment; it’s about controlling the technology, the supply chain, the software, giving us the ability to evolve this technology as a whole for the market,” Philip said. “We don’t want to be waiting for our allies to decide that they want to give us this ability; we want … to be able to make our own decision to move forward and build the things that we need.”
Feature image courtesy InDro Robotics.