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GS Engineering was recently awarded a 1.5 million dollar Small Business Innovation Research contract with the United States Marine Corps. GS Engineering in Houghton will further develop its unmanned platform, Remote Expeditionary Autonomous Pioneer System (REAPr). The system works as a sort of Swiss army knife for the Marine Corps to complete material handling, clear trails, construction, explosive hazard defeat, and refueling capabilities.
“But the advantage of the program is that it’s intellectual property that we own to develop a platform. That we can advance in the future. And it will be sold to Department of Defense units. As well as there are commercial applications. This is an unmanned platform. The prototype is going to be tele-operational. But going into the future we are going to look at adding automated capabilities to it.” – Andy Diepen, Chief Engineer and Principal Investigator, GS Engineering
GS Engineering will need to show proof of capability within six months of being awarded the SBIR Contract. By using simulation and digital engineering GS Engineering can develop a virtual prototype to show the system’s capability before investing in detailed engineering.
“I think the advantage to the simulation is that we can work on things in the software, computing systems. All of the stuff that normally if we didn’t have a sim, we would need the hardware here. And that lets us work kind of work in parallel, work together, with the actual physical build.” – Matt Miller, Electrical Engineer, GS Engineering
In GS Engineering’s 20 years of existence, the company has worked on several government contracts. Including Off-highway vehicles and military vehicle development. In recent years GS Engineering has begun to expand its development capabilities beyond vehicles. Venturing into autonomous and unmanned systems. Find the full SBIR Award release here.
