Photos: Army designates year's best inventions

Several ground vehicles made it into the top 10 list, in one fashion or another. Shown here is the RECCE vehicle system, an adaptation of the Cougar 6x6 MRAP (mine-resistant ambush-protected) vehicle, used by combat engineers for route clearance. The RECCE differs from the Cougar's base configuration because of the addition of several subsystems: the Protector remote-weapon assembly; Gyrocam image sensors; aviation Blue Force Tracker technology for identifying friendly forces; and a Robot Deployment System that lets the crew deploy and retrieve a Talon robot without opening the vehicle.