Autonomous vehicles remain a long-time goal, both in the commercial and military sectors. At a panel held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at Colorado State University on Wednesday, researchers and officials looked at the challenges standing in the way of vehicles capable of full autonomy in any environment.

“There’s a lot of technological barriers,” said Lt. Col. Chris Orlowski, who manages the Army office responsible for executing the hardware and software programs for robotic combat vehicles. He said some that are often overlooked include “our safety.”

This summer, the Army tested different types of robotic combat vehicles at Fort Hood, Texas. During the exercise, soldiers tested RCV platforms’ capacity by driving them on various terrain conditions commonly encountered on the battlefield. The tests also looked at the vehicles’ ability to identify and avoid obstacles and their capacity to fire weapons while moving.

Although the tests were considered a success, fielding truly autonomous vehicles is still years away. At the Fort Hood testing, a safety observer followed every platform in case of an incident during each exercise, according to Orlowski.

“We need to move away from that, especially when we want to field these provably safe systems in the future,” he said.

In recent years, autonomous vehicle ventures from companies such as Tesla have started to break into the commercial sector. This summer, regulators in San Francisco gave a robotic taxi service the green light earlier to begin charging passengers.

The rollout of robotic vehicles in a military capacity has been much slower. Although DARPA, the Pentagon’s research agency, has been working on self-driving vehicles for close to two decades, military robotics vehicles have to deal with a problem not found in the streets of San Francisco and other U.S. cities: the lack of roads and disarray expected on battlefields.

On regular streets, robotics vehicles have to account for expected obstacles like pedestrians, garbage cans and mailboxes. Meanwhile, the battlefield presents a whole host of different obstacles.

“You have to figure out how other things are moving and if they’re really adversarial, that makes it all the more difficult because maybe they want to move in a way that doesn’t make it easy for you to figure that out,” said Deva Ramanan, the director of the Carnegie Mellon University Argo AI Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research.

Outside of safety precautions, the Army also needs to examine its contracting process for robotic vehicles, Orlowski said. While it’s one thing to set up budgets, he said that it’s another to start leveraging authorities and signal to the defense industry that it’s time to start developing products.

The Army said this month that it is preparing to make future decisions on the potential acquisition and use of unmanned systems in combat by conducting additional soldier training and evaluation sessions with RCV platforms over the next 36 months.

When the vehicles are eventually brought to the battlefield, Orlowski said that he sees the technology being parceled out on an individual unit basis to augment the unit’s capabilities rather than putting them together in a group formation.

The Army lacks force structure to give every company, battalion and brigade electronic warfare capabilities or systems to counter drones. This gap could be filled by providing one or two autonomous vehicles with those capabilities to units, he said.

“I think where they offer promise is the ability to bring payloads that we can’t put on a manned platform today because we don’t have the size, weight power, capacity to do so,” Orlowski said.

As part of a $3 billion package for Ukraine that the Pentagon announced Wednesday, the Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment system is a portable kit that can be installed on most vehicles with a cargo bed for launching the Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System or other laser-guided munitions.

The L3Harris-made weapon ― a small, four-barreled rocket launcher and sensor ball ― can be mounted in two hours and operated by a single person, the company said. It can be equipped with missiles to hit ground or air targets including unmanned aircraft systems.

“The Vampire system itself is a counter-UAS system, ” said Colin Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy, said at a press briefing Wednesday. “It is a kinetic system that uses small missiles essentially to shoot UAVs out of the sky.”

While the Vampire system isn’t advertised as a counter-drone weapon on L3Harris’ website, Ukraine has used similar munition-style weapons to take down drones throughout its conflict with Russia.

As the Russia conflict crosses the six-month mark, the most recent aid package is aimed at providing sustainable and affordable options to Ukraine. Alongside the Vampire, the Pentagon is also sending Puma drones and a host of ammunition.

“Our VAMPIRE system will provide the Ukrainian people with even more robust capabilities as they continue to defend their country and democracy in Europe,” Melbourne, Fla.-based L3Harris said in a statement to C4ISRNET. “We will continue to offer our steadfast support of their mission.”

Drone warfare has been heavily utilized by both sides in the six-month-old conflict, with many being sourced from countries outside the war.

Kyiv has drawn support from the U.S. and the United Kingdom, both of whom pledged new drones and counter-drone technology to the conflict on Wednesday, Ukraine’s Independence Day. Russia, meanwhile, has looked to Iran to sustain its supply of drones, according to U.S. officials.

The Vampire is part of a larger package in aid to Ukraine, bringing the total amount supplied to the country during the Russia-Ukraine conflict to more than $13.5 billion since the start of the Biden administration.

The Biden administration selected the Vampire — a low-cost and easy-to-assemble weapon compared to other counter-drone measures, such as electronic warfare technologies — for a package advertised as providing supplies for Ukraine’s long-term needs.

“We’re trying to be very deliberate about what systems we think makes the most sense for Ukraine to have in that context, and it also matters very much: Can they sustain it? Can they afford it? Because of course billions of dollars of international assistance may not be something 10 years from now or 20 years from now,” Kahl said.

When the Pentagon did not disclose which “Vampire” system they were sending to Ukraine, it fueled to speculation on social media on as to what weapon the Ukrainians were set to receive. L3Harris confirmed evening that the system in question was the rocket equipment.

The rocket launcher isn’t the first weapon nicknamed after the creature of the night to enter the conflict.

Footage published by the 10th Separate Mountain Assault Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on July 11, shows Ukraine using the Czech Republic’s RM-70 VAMPIR 122mm Multiple Launch Rocket Systems.

The Czech system, which is designed by Excalibur Army, looks similar to the the L3Harris’ weapon, with a rocket-launching system as the main feature. Unlike the L3Harris system, the MLRS Vampire uses a large military vehicle rather than a simple pickup truck as its launching platform.

“Ukrainian MLRS Vampire aren’t afraid of sunlight,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said in a Tweet accompanying the video. “They are not afraid of anybody; they’re just doing their job.”