Overland AI ULTRA

The Overland AI ULTRA is a purpose-built, fully autonomous American uncrewed ground vehicle that pairs the DARPA RACER-derived OverDrive autonomy stack with a modular light platform, and is the subject of the US Marine Corps' first production buy of autonomous ground vehicles.

Overview

ULTRA is a light, fully autonomous tactical ground vehicle built in-house by Overland AI, a Seattle-based defense-autonomy company founded in 2022 and led by co-founder and CEO Byron Boots. Unlike remotely driven battlefield robots, the vehicle is designed to perceive terrain, plan routes and drive itself off-road in GPS-denied and communications-degraded environments, using the company's OverDrive autonomy software, its SPARK sensor-and-compute hardware kit, and the OverWatch command-and-control interface that lets a single operator task multiple vehicles.

The system moved from product launch to procurement quickly. Unveiled in April 2025, ULTRA anchored a roughly $19.7 million US Marine Corps production contract in June 2026 to resupply the Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS) counter-drone batteries — a deal Overland and the Pentagon trade press describe as the first US military production contract primed by a ground-autonomy company, per DefenseScoop and Defense News. In July 2026 the US Army named Overland AI one of four vendors for its Engineer Autonomous Breaching Capability (EABC) program, according to Soldier Systems Daily and Breaking Defense.

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