THeMIS Military Ground Drones Show They Can Work in Cold and Snow Just as Well

This crew is in cahoots with a lot of other companies for the development of something called the integrated Modular Unmanned Ground System (iMUGS). It’s a mammoth effort of several European countries to come up with a continental standard for such autonomous or remotely controlled vehicles.

THeMIS is a big part of iMUGS, and we’ve seen it perform as advertised several times before, as Milrem already held five demonstrations with the hardware in action, having it do anything from shooting like crazy at abandoned vans in combat exercises to disposing of improvised explosive device (IEDs). We’ve never seen it deployed in arctic conditions before, but that changed this week.

In the video attached below this text, you can see just how useful the tracked robot is for those fielding it. The exercise's profile called for two THeMIS machines to be deployed somewhere in Finland in support of infantry units, and show what they can do in front of 100 people with some kind of stake in the technology.

One of the robots was controlled in beyond line-of-sight conditions, from a command post set up inside an armored personnel carrier, while the other from up close by means of a portable controller.

The main tasks of the robots were to aid troops with transport duties (in this case they carried ballistic protection shields), but also to help them detect the position of the enemy by using drones, lasers, and other advanced systems.

The THeMIS is actually a family of vehicles, powered by hybrid diesel-electric drivetrains. Generally, they are capable of carrying a payload weighing as much as 750 kg (1,650 pounds). These can come as anything from wounded troops to hardware for ordinance disposal and intelligence operations. Also, the robots can be transformed into platforms for weapons that can be operated remotely.

The THeMIS are already in service with the armies of some 16 countries, half of which are NATO members, but to date, we don’t know of any being used for actual combat duties. That may change soon though, as Milrem announced in November last year 14 UGVs will be deployed to Ukraine to help with the war effort.

More specifically, seven of them were to be used by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) for casualty evacuation before the end of 2022, and another seven, meant for route clearance, should be deployed this year. Since making the announcement the company did not come back with an update on THeMIS deployment to Ukraine.