Here Come the Laser Robots
Laser weapons and unmanned ground vehicles are a match made in heaven -- or your dystopian nightmares, depending on how you look at it.
A French defense contractor recently unveiled an unusual new weapon system that looks like something ripped from the opening sequence of Terminator 2: Judgement Day: an unmanned ground vehicle outfitted with a laser turret.
In mid-November, tactical vehicle maker SOFRAME used the country’s National Infantry Days to show off a specialized variant of its HE441 lightweight all-terrain vehicle outfitted with a 2 kilowatt High Energy Laser for Multiple Applications – Power (HELMA-P) laser weapon turret.
The HELMA-P, in development since 2017 by longtime laser and optics specialist CILAS for the French Armed Forces, is designed to burn incoming unmanned aerial vehicles out of the sky at ranges of up to 1 kilometer or dazzle their sensors at ranges of up to 3 kilometers.
The HE441 “is built to perform across diverse and challenging terrains, featuring a lightweight yet rugged structure that allows it to navigate rough, off-road landscapes at high speeds,” as Army Recognition reports. “This mobility, paired with its open-cabin design, allows the vehicle to function as a multi-mission platform, ready for rapid deployment in high-stakes combat scenarios.”
The HELMA-P consists of a laser emitter and a cluster of high-precision optical sensors on a two-axis turret, a configuration that purportedly allows the system to track and detect fast-moving airborne targets “within seconds,” Army Recognition reports. According to CILAS, the HELMA-P is effective not just against drones, but improvised explosive devices and incoming rocket, artillery, and mortar fire.
The French military had previously tested a HELMA-P aboard the French Navy Horizon-class anti-air frigate Forbin in the Mediterranean Sea in June 2023 following successful tests of the system ashore back in 2020 and 2021, according to Naval News.
Those tests were apparently successful enough to induce the French government to deploy two HELMA-P systems to help secure the airspace over the country’s Île-de-France region during the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics there in July and August.
Then, in September, CILAS announced that the French military had ordered an unspecified number of additional HELMA-P systems to equip its Army, Navy, and Air Force.
Marrying the HELMA-P with an unmanned HE441 ATV seems like a match made in heaven, offering operators not just a low-cost, remotely-operated counter-drone system, but a completely mobile one that could extend layered air defenses from fixed sites to maneuver formations so they can swat down incoming drones while on the move.
Indeed, the US military in particular has embraced this concept through programs like the US Army’s Stryker-mounted 50 kilowatt Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) and future 20 kilowatt Army Multi-Purpose High-Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) that the service envisions for its Infantry Squad Vehicle fleet (the US Marine Corps is also pursuing the integration of a laser weapon system into its Joint Light Tactical Vehicles). Army officials even recently discussed adding laser weapons to the service’s future Robotic Combat Vehicles.
But the success of mobile laser weapons depends not just on hardware, but software as well. As BlueHalo CEO Jonathan Moneymaker previously told me for a story in Fast Company, the success of his company’s LOCUST Laser Weapon System as the Army’s new weapon of choice is directly tied with the sophisticated acquisition, tracking, and pointing software that allows operators to lock onto fast-moving targets with extraordinary precision. Only when married with advanced robotics can a system maintain a coherent laser beam on a target for the several seconds it takes to neutralize an incoming threat despite, say, the turbulence created by driving at high speeds on uneven terrain as the HE441 was designed to do.
Beyond new tactical vehicles, laser-equipped ground robots may end up becoming a fixture of the future battlefield sooner than you might expect. In 2023, for example, German defense contractor MBDA Deutschland showed off its 20 kilowatt Modular Integrated Laser Optic System (MILOS) integrated into an unmanned ground vehicle. With the rapid proliferation of unmanned platforms across conventional militaries around the world, adding relatively low cost-per-shot laser weapons like the HELMA-P and LOCUST seems like the logical next step, especially as such systems finally reach the point of operational effectiveness.
While it’s unclear whether the French military will end up adopting SOFRAME’s mobile HELMA-P system, the emergence of the platform in the footsteps of the German MILOS suggests that the age of laser-toting robots may not be too far off. Who knows — it might even look something like this:
This is one great area of Interest to the World whether they know it yet or not despite the incredible slowness of the Armed Forces. Thanks Jared