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2021-08-01

Technoday 2021: Arquus Emphasises Innovation

Recently, Arquus organised the third edition of the Technoday, a conference dedicated to innovation in the field of land defence. The company presented the results of the work carried out over the last two years in future-oriented areas ranging from power generation in operations to innovative support and maintenance solutions.

The event provided the company an opportunity to present the progress of work in several fields, and to look ahead to the land mobility programmes of tomorrow. The two days also offered the chance to exchange ideas, compare points of view, answer questions and guide the work of Arquus engineers.

At the event, Arquus welcomed several military and civilian personalities, who discussed the evolution of land combat and the answers to the challenges facing Armies. This year, Arquus focused on six major themes: energy transition, robotisation, digitalisation, survivability, support, but also on innovations in the industrial field through a workshop dedicated to the innovative factory. Moreover, Arquus presented its everyday innovations, developed in its factories or in the field close to the forces.

The event saw conferences being led by Philippe Divry, SVP Group Trucks Strategy of the Volvo Group, and General Bertrand Boyard, Special Advisor to the President Emmanuel Levacher, in charge of European Affairs.

For the first time, Arquus opened its doors to partner companies, with whom the company works hand-in-hand to ensure the improvement of its solutions and the development of breakthrough innovations. The company welcomed Cerbair, Internest, Robotics Industrie, Prévision IO, Squadrone and Air Captif, as well as the VEDECOM Institute.

To build its innovation, Arquus also works with leading engineering schools such as ENSTA Bretagne, France. These partnerships are intended to create new perspectives on the future of land defence applications and meet the growing demand from students who want to broaden their skills by training in the technologies and major challenges of land systems engineering in highly technical fields. In this context, Arquus created in 2018 a teaching chair dedicated to defence innovation at ENSTA ParisTech.

Displaying Progress

Arquus presented electric equipment on loan from Volvo Construction Equipment: an electric compact excavator, a wheel loader and a fast loader. The company exhibited a 100 per cent electric D ZE truck on loan from Renault Trucks. This new generation industrial vehicle has a GVW of 16 tonnes and a maximum range of 400km.

These vehicles illustrate the technological and industrial strength of the Volvo Group, from which Arquus benefits beyond its own research and expertise centres, but also the practical nature of the solutions Arquus offers for military applications. Based on civilian technologies that have already been proven under difficult conditions, they are well suited to the specific uses of the battlefield.

Furthermore, a synthesis of all the company’s historical know-how in vehicle design, robust and relevant technology development, and systems integration, the Scarabee was at the heart of Arquus’ presentations during Technoday. It embeds the company’s latest advances in survivability, digitalisation, robotisation and energy.

In addition to these technological building blocks, the Scarabee was presented at Technoday as a platform designed to accommodate numerous plug-and-play systems, thanks to Arquus’ Battlenet vetronics suite. This Battle Management System (BMS) aggregates the various data from the vehicle’s different systems, sensors, and effectors, presenting all the information on the vehicle’s status and tactical situation on a single screen and lightening the mental load of the commander.

As part of Technoday, the Scarabee was equipped with a remotely operated turret combining optronics, an effector and a self-protection solution thanks to an independent smoke-launching crown, as well as an aerial drone that can be piloted from Battlenet, which reminds us of the importance of the problem of autonomous or semi-autonomous objects and the relevance of their association with land vehicles. Arquus is also continuing to work on the Mission Extender, a robotic module designed to accompany the Scarabee and increase its tactical capabilities.

Launched commercially at IDEX 2021 in Abu Dhabi, the Scarabee is a mature vehicle, ready for industrialisation, but also a technology demonstrator, some of whose building blocks could be used in the design of future armoured, light, or medium vehicles. In this respect, Arquus is part of the FAMOUS (European Future Highly Mobile Augmented Armoured Systems) group, which was set up to strengthen links between European partners and optimise synergies, standardisation, and interoperability in the field of land armoured vehicles.

Additionally, in the context of anti-drone warfare, Arquus is considering the development of new capabilities by integrating detection, jamming and specific effector functions.

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