Autonomy
Robotic Research, LLC
Abstract
Autonomous systems excel at some tasks and are poor at others, especially when compared to humans.
Automatically computing line of sight from a-priori data and measuring distances are some tasks in which
autonomous systems excel, but doing subtle recognition tasks, like finding humans in a vegetated
environment or differentiating between non-combatants and the red team, are not tasks that the state
of the art has yet to achieve. Robotic Research is uniquely placed to perform this research.
Robotic Research’s software and
hardware autonomy kits have
autonomously driven large vehicles (with
no passengers) for thousands of miles on
civilian roadways, with civilian traffic on
the unstructured roads of Afghanistan
for Special Forces Programs (Figure 1).
These systems – deployed in 2013 –
represent the first completely
autonomous ground vehicle systems for
the DoD, and the government
community in general. It was also a first
for the DoD’s Army Test and Evaluation
Center (ATEC) to provide an “acceptable
risk” level for autonomous driving with
nobody on board. To our knowledge, this
has not been repeated by any program since.
Robotic Research is also the prime for two keystone programs for autonomous mobility: AGR and ExL/F.
AGR is developing the de facto autonomous mobility kit (A-Kit) for the next generation of army trucks and
logistic vehicles. Robotic Research is therefore defining algorithms, interfaces, and architectures that will
become the requirements for the next generation of DoD vehicles. But even more relevant to this effort,
the ExLF program builds on the progress demonstrated during the Autonomous Mobility Applique
Systems (AMAS) Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD) and AGR programs to develop
unmanned prototype systems that address the needs of the Leader Follower Directed Requirement and
Program of Record. ExLF will equip existing military ground vehicles and will conduct an Operational
Technical Demonstration with scalable autonomy technology showcasing the integration of modular kits,
common interfaces, and a scalable open architecture. The AGR architecture is being developed to become
the de-facto autonomous architecture for all foreseeable ground robotic vehicles.
Robotic Research has fully demonstrated autonomous mapping and search missions with groups of
vehicles. Although the utility functions of those coordination efforts are different from the ones needed
for this topic, the underlying structure of the distributed localization and coordination engine is being
leveraged for SubT and urban warfare applications.
