What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project FB3 of PE 0605053A. This is the budget justification's own description of work that has not happened yet — the one thing no other level of the budget carries.
Funding supports an Army decision on the production and fielding of Ground Autonomous Mobility solutions based on FY2026 demonstrations and Soldier feedback. Production-ization tasks will also occur. Continued software and hardware development to enable, or enhance, robotic autonomy across a spectrum of use cases, to include "non-primary road" environments (i.e. unmarked or unpaved, trails and other natural surfaces that may only include minimal evidence of prior vehicular traffic). Feedback from Soldiers will be managed through a Product Backlog, where prioritized mobility capabilities will continue to increase effectiveness within waypoint navigation, convoy behaviors, behaviors during loss of communications, and sentry functionality in operationally relevant domains.
Increase from FY 2026 to FY 2027 is attributed to a better understanding of the prioritization and the development of new features based on Soldier feedback.
FY2026: the year under way
Prior-year accomplishments and current-year plans from the same exhibit. Context for the FY2027 plan, not a series — an activity partitions its project exactly in the request year, but can under-cover it in earlier years.
FY 2026 RDTE supports the engineering and development of platform agnostic, autonomous mobility solutions. This encompasses the autonomous capabilities required for navigating platforms and performing missions with decreased user input. Funding will procure commercially available technology for integration onto Army platforms with demonstration of capability geared towards determining what hardening is necessary in terms of cyber/network/militarization to execute large scale production and fielding.
Three years, and no five-year plan
An R-2A activity publishes the prior year, the current year and the budget year. The FYDP outyears exist at project and program-element level and are deliberately absent here rather than inferred. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | Enacted | 29.8 |
| FY2027 | Request | 30.8 |
This activity is 16% of project FB3's FY2027 request and 16% of PE 0605053A's. In the request year the activities under a project sum to it exactly; in the current year they under-cover it in about 9% of cases, so an activity's delta can legitimately exceed its parent's and the two must not be compared row to row.
8 activities in project FB3
Every R-2A line of this project, largest FY2027 request first. Linked where the activity has enough of its own narrative to carry a page; the rest are shown in full on the program-element page.