Roper Archives are key projects that our team worked on prior to Roper's founding in 2018.
The vision of Special Operations Command (SOCOM) Commander, Admiral William McRaven, TALOS was launched in 2013 with the aim of developing an armored suit with full-body ballistics protection and integrated Visual Augmentation System (VAS) and integrated sensor and radio feeds. The project was retired in 2019. While the suit was not fielded, there were a number of important spin-off technologies that TALOS was a test bed for.
"TALOS was a highly ambitious project that inspired strong emotions due to its high-profile origins, the extreme technical challenges, and the financial expenditures," recalls Roper CEO Maeve Garigan. "It was also structured differently from other military projects, with SOCOM staff and representatives intimately involved in the technology development process. Traditional defense acquisition involves hammering out system requirements and then selecting contractors to do most of the engineering work. With TALOS, SOCOM established an innovation cell to lead the effort, with active duty special operators embedded as advisors. This allowed the development process to take an agile approach with an unmatched focus on the operator's needs."
"Being fully centered on the user's needs is in my DNA as a technology developer and as a leader, so this approach fit my values. Technology only matters if it helps people, and TALOS was a very intense example of that."
The suit consisted of several integrated and highly complex subsystems, each with a dedicated technical team: Armor, Exoskeleton, Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C4I), Power, and Helmet/VAS.
"I had the privilege as serving as the C4I team lead," explained Garigan. "When I was in that role, we worked on integrating multiple radios, antennas, sensor feeds, and edge computing capabilities into a highly constrained suit design. Not only was it highly constrained in size and weight, it was highly constrained on power. The exoskeleton, which supported the armor and moved the suit, was very power intensive. Every ounce added to the suit had an outsized effect on the power needs and size of the exoskeleton. That's just laws of physics."
"My team was focused on maximizing capability and providing the best capability to the user, while minimizing size, weight and power. We had to select and integrate radios and processors. We designed circuit boards and novel antennas. There was creative mounting, cabling, and wiring to ensure proper power, data, radio, and data interfaces with the other subsystems. We had to continuously collect and address feedback from our operator advisors. We had to consider how the suit would be used in combat. And throughout we maintained a fast-paced schedule and detailed documentation so we could trace requirements and manage the overall system configuration. Every aspect of the design must be tied to a requirement, and that requirement must be tied to a need."
"My role required a steady hand and strong technical and soft skills. We had a large technical team working on the bleeding edge of technology and many competing design opinions for us to work through and compromise on. Everyone had to abandon their ego and focus on the mission—otherwise failure was guaranteed. The work also tapped into my creativity and technical problem-solving. Dealing with the extreme size, weight and power constraints made me think creatively about how I might solve similar problems using complementary approaches."
"I am proud of what we achieved as a team and I am grateful for the experience. The lessons learned sparked my subsequent research and inventions in low size, weight and power sensors with encrypted networking and embedded artificial intelligence and machine learning. Our PATCH for off-grid texting, GPS and activity monitoring is a very different product, but has roots in my experience with TALOS."
"Our products provide the right information at the right time to the right person to make important decisions. That's how we use technology to empower people and transform how they solve real-world problems."