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Off-road unmanned vehicles are challenging the unforgiving terrain of the Mojave Desert at the US Army’s National Training Center in California.
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The autonomous dune buggies sought to demonstrate independent movement of combat-scale vehicles in complex, mission-relevant, off-road environments as part of the DARPA Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program from 12 to 27 March.
Unmanned vehicles completed more than 55 driverless runs reaching speeds of about 40km/h and travelling around six and 17 kilometres each.
The 12 robotic vehicles completed 395 kilometres over 24.6 hours in total on course.
DARPA Tactical Technology Office RACER program manager Stuart Young said teams from Carnegie Mellon University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the University of Washington participated alongside assistance from Army Research Laboratory researchers.
“At Experiment Three, we successfully demonstrated significant improvements in our off-road speeds while simultaneously reducing any interaction with the vehicle during test runs,” he said.
“We were also honoured to have representatives from the Army and Marine Corps at the experiment to facilitate transition of technologies developed in RACER to future service unmanned initiatives and concepts.”
This was the third experiment of off-road unmanned vehicle performance after initial testing with a safety operator overseeing operations in a supporting chase vehicle.
Previous testing in March and September last year evaluated autonomous software stacks developed for the RACER program using DARPA-provided robot systems in a variety of environments.
“We provided the performers RACER fleet vehicles with common performance, sensing, and compute,” said Young.
“This enables us to evaluate the performance of the performer team autonomy software in similar environments and compare it to human performance.
“During this latest experiment, we continued to push vehicle limits in perceiving the environments to greater distances, enabling further increase in speeds and better adaptation to newly encountered environmental conditions that will continue into RACER’s next phase.”
Phase 2 will focus on maturing software stacks and testing autonomy over longer off-road courses with fewer interventions. It will evaluate large-scale demonstration platforms that are representative of a combat-scale vehicle and require increased speeds twice that of the first phase performance.
