Textron Systems Unveils Ripsaw M5 Robotic Combat Vehicle
In October 2019, Textron Systems unveiled the Ripsaw M5 Robotic Combat Vehicle at the Association of the United States Army Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., demonstrating an unmanned ground vehicle with autonomous navigation, 360-degree situational awareness, and configurable mission payloads.
Background
Ground forces have used remote-controlled vehicles for decades, mostly for dangerous jobs like clearing mines or inspecting roadside bombs. The operators kept the machines at a safe distance and watched through a camera feed, sending commands by radio. That worked well enough for slow, deliberate tasks in permissive environments, but it had a hard ceiling. A human operator controlling one vehicle in real time cannot react at the pace of a firefight, and radio links are vulnerable to jamming. The further the vehicle ranged from its operator, the less useful it became.
By the mid-2010s, several defence contractors were trying to push past that ceiling. The goal was a vehicle that could do more than follow commands: one that could read its surroundings, flag threats on its own, and eventually act on decisions without waiting for a signal from a person. The U.S. Army was watching closely. It had been evaluating the concept of robotic combat vehicles as companions to manned formations, machines that could absorb risk in the most dangerous parts of an assault or advance. What it lacked was hardware that could actually do that job on a militarily useful platform.
What happened
Textron Systems brought the Ripsaw M5 to the Association of the United States Army Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. in October 2019. The vehicle is tracked and fully unmanned, built around the Ripsaw platform that Howe & Howe Technologies had originally developed as a high-speed rescue and support vehicle. Textron had taken that foundation and rebuilt it around autonomous systems and mission flexibility.
The M5 can be operated remotely or given a degree of autonomous navigation, finding and following a route without a human steering it input by input. Its 360-degree situational awareness system uses cameras and sensors to give operators, or the vehicle’s own decision systems, a complete picture of the surrounding area at all times. The payload section is configurable: Textron designed it to accept different mission packages depending on what the Army needs. Those include a weapon station, a ground-penetrating radar for detecting buried objects, a mine plough, a roller for triggering improvised explosive devices, and a Mine Clearing Line Charge. The vehicle can reach speeds of up to 65 mph.
What Textron showed at the AUSA expo was a demonstration platform, not a fielded system. The Army was still in the process of evaluating robotic combat vehicle concepts, and the Ripsaw M5 was one submission into that assessment. The significance was less in what the vehicle could do that day and more in what it represented: a tracked combat vehicle where autonomy and remote control were the design centre, not an afterthought bolted onto a vehicle made for human crews.
Why it mattered
The Ripsaw M5 represented a step toward autonomous unmanned ground combat vehicles capable of operating alongside manned forces, integrating computer-vision-based situational awareness and remote or autonomous control with modular weapon and route-clearance payloads. Its public demonstration at the AUSA expo marked a shift from remote-controlled prototypes toward vehicles with onboard autonomous decision-support systems. The platform contributed to ongoing U.S. Army evaluation of robotic combat vehicles as force-multipliers in contested environments.
Organisations
Textron Systems, Association of the United States Army
Sources
- Ripsaw M5 – Product Page.Textron Systems.Official
- Ripsaw M5 Robotic Combat Vehicle.Army Technology.Secondary
- Textron unveils Ripsaw M5 robotic combat vehicle at AUSA.Defense News.Secondary
Cite this page
AI Achievements. (2019). Textron Systems Unveils Ripsaw M5 Robotic Combat Vehicle. Retrieved 2026-08-22, from https://achievements.ai/milestone/ripsaw-m5-autonomous-battle-tank
@misc{achievements_ripsaw_m5_autonomous_battle_tank,
title = {Textron Systems Unveils Ripsaw M5 Robotic Combat Vehicle},
author = {{AI Achievements}},
year = {2019},
url = {https://achievements.ai/milestone/ripsaw-m5-autonomous-battle-tank}
}