French engineers turned Cold War tank into robot fighter

A tank that first rolled off a French production line in the 1960s just showed up at Eurosatory with no crew inside it and a robot turret on top, and the company behind the conversion wants it to represent something bigger than a single old tank getting a second life.

S2M Equipment and KNDS France unveiled REFURBOT at this year’s Eurosatory exhibition in Paris, a fully retrofitted AMX-30 tank converted into an unmanned ground vehicle using KNDS’ TOXO robotization kit, with S2M displaying the vehicle at its stand for the duration of the show, running June 15 through 19, 2026. The companies are framing the vehicle as a demonstration of what can be done with the thousands of aging tank hulls still sitting in storage or service across European militaries rather than scrapping them outright.

France built 3,571 AMX-30 tanks between 1966 and 1994, a production run that made it the backbone of French armored forces for decades and put roughly 36 metric tons of steel into a tank that originally carried a four-person crew, a 105mm main gun, and a top speed of about 65 km/h (40 mph). Plenty of those hulls remain in inventories around the world even though the AMX-30 itself has long since been retired from frontline combat duty in most of the militaries that operated it, which makes the chassis an obvious candidate for repurposing rather than disposal. REFURBOT strips out the manned turret entirely and replaces the four-person crew compartment’s combat role with remote operation, turning a Cold War-era main battle tank into what the defense industry now calls an uncrewed ground vehicle, or UGV, a category that has expanded rapidly as militaries look for ways to put firepower on a battlefield without putting a soldier’s body directly behind it.

What makes the conversion work mechanically is the TOXO kit, KNDS’ robotization package that handles the autonomous and remote-control systems needed to drive, steer, and operate a vehicle that no longer has anyone sitting inside it. Bolting a robotization kit onto an existing combat vehicle hull rather than designing a new uncrewed platform from scratch isn’t a new idea in itself, but doing it at this scale, on a chassis as large and as heavily armored as a 36-ton main battle tank, sets REFURBOT apart from the smaller robotic combat vehicles that have dominated the UGV market so far, many of which started life closer to the size of an all-terrain vehicle than a tank.

In place of the AMX-30’s original manned turret and its 105mm Modèle F1 cannon, REFURBOT mounts the ARX-25, a remotely operated weapon station built around KNDS’ 25M811 automatic cannon firing 25mm x 137 ammunition. The cannon feeds from a dual ammunition supply, meaning it can switch between armor-piercing or armor-piercing incendiary rounds and high-explosive fragmentation rounds depending on the target, drawing from a stored capacity of 280 rounds. The ARX-25 isn’t an unproven concept either. The same turret system already arms variants of the VBCI, the wheeled infantry fighting vehicle that has been in French Army service for years, giving REFURBOT’s weapon system a service record that predates this particular vehicle by a wide margin. Stabilized day, night, and thermal sighting systems round out the package, and the whole turret operates fully automated, which the companies say allows the cannon to engage everything from lightly armored vehicles to aerial targets such as drones and hovering helicopters, along with infantry targets, at distances beyond 2,500 meters (8,200 ft).

That spread of targets, from ground vehicles to drones to helicopters, reflects how the threat picture facing armored vehicles has broadened considerably since the AMX-30 was first designed for a battlefield dominated by tank-on-tank engagements. Small attack drones and loitering munitions have become a persistent danger to armored vehicles in recent conflicts, a lesson driven home repeatedly during the Russia-Ukraine war, where cheap commercial and military drones have destroyed or disabled far more expensive armored vehicles than traditional anti-tank weapons in many documented engagements. A 25mm autocannon with the elevation and tracking software to engage a hovering helicopter or a small drone gives a vehicle like REFURBOT a layered defensive option that a 1960s-era tank gun, designed almost exclusively for direct fire against other armored vehicles, was never built to provide.

Removing the four soldiers who would otherwise sit inside an AMX-30 changes the entire risk calculation of sending the vehicle into a contested area, since an uncrewed platform can absorb damage, draw enemy fire, or get destroyed without anyone dying inside it. Militaries across Europe and the United States have invested heavily in robotic combat vehicles for exactly that reason over the past several years, treating them as expendable scouts or fire-support platforms that can take risks a crewed vehicle commander would have to think twice about. KNDS itself has been building toward a broader family of unmanned ground systems under names like CENTURIO, smaller robotic platforms equipped with similarly modular turret options, and REFURBOT extends that same robotization philosophy onto a hull with vastly more mass, armor, and mobility than those lighter robots can offer.