Company Developing Hybrid Energy Motorbike For Special Operators
As the nature of warfare changes, it’s likely special operators will need
increasingly stealthy ways to penetrate remote, hard-to-reach locations. That is
one of the reasons Logos Technologies is developing a hybrid-powered offroad
motorbike for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Wade Pulliam, the
company’s manager of advanced concepts, stated in an email.
The company
received a small business innovation research grant earlier this year to design
the bike and expects that DARPA will approve further funding to make a
prototype, he said. The vehicle will be lighter and easier to handle than the
Kawasaki M1030M1 currently in use.
“It is capable of near-silent
operation as well as extended range,” he said. “We believe the bike can easily
maintain a range of 100 miles between refuels … sufficient to satisfy an
existing military capability gap.”
The motorbike can run on multiple
fuels, including JP-8, gasoline or diesel. Logos expects that it will improve on
the M1030M1’s fuel efficiency by at least 10 percent, Pulliam said. Its battery
can also be used as an auxiliary power supply.
To develop the vehicle,
Logos partnered with BRD Motorcycles, which designed a militarized version of
its RedShift MX electric motocross bike. It will be powered by a hybrid-electric
propulsion system that Logos developed for an unmanned aerial vehicle, Pulliam
said.
The biggest challenge for the team is integrating the vehicle with
the propulsion system.
“What we’re doing is putting [a] multi-fuel
hybrid-electric power system on an all-wheel drive motorcycle, something that
hasn’t been done before. There is significantly less real estate available on
the motorcycle, so finding space for all of the systems that must be added is
much more difficult than on a car,” he said.
