Forterra’s Common Autonomy Stack
Scott Sanders, Chief Growth Officer at Forterra, on autonomy for every vehicle
This is really a claim about owning the control layer, not just the vehicle. Forterra is positioning ground autonomy as one node inside a mixed fleet where trucks, drones, and drone boats all need to share tasking, position data, and mission status in a way an operator can actually use under bad connectivity. That is why the product has to look more like a common mission system than a self driving kit bolted onto one truck.
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Forterra keeps coming back to the same architecture, distributed autonomy at the edge, degraded comms, and a common stack that can move across many ground platforms. The company now describes itself as integrating a common autonomy stack across major ground programs, which makes interoperability part of the product rather than an add on.
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The closest analogue on the air side is Shield AI. Hivemind is being packaged for OEMs, governments, and partners as a reusable autonomy layer, and Shield has extended it into cross domain work with HII. That shows where value is moving, from one exquisite robot to software that lets many different robots coordinate.
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On the maritime side, companies like Saronic are building USVs for GPS and comms denied missions, and the Navy is explicitly buying toward larger families of unmanned systems across domains. If every domain fields its own closed stack, operators end up juggling separate screens and workflows. The winning vendors will be the ones that make those systems legible to one mission team.
The market is heading toward autonomy middleware for defense. Ground, air, and sea startups will keep building specialized vehicles, but the bigger prize will go to companies that become the standard way those vehicles are tasked, updated, and coordinated in the field. Forterra is aiming to make ground autonomy its wedge into that broader command layer.