Recent testing at Fort Hood, TX showed state-of-the-art autonomy for critically needed applications for the US Army.
Unmanned operations in snow and rain.
Owners Karl Murphy (L) and Alberto Lacaze (R) in front of an unmanned Stryker vehicle.
DEMO I, II, III
DEMO I-II-III were a series of programs were Robotic Research researchers played critical roles in the development of autonomous ground vehicle technologies that are now being used by most other programs (work was started while at NIST). This program was managed initially by Army Research Lab.
Demo III was the culmination of almost two decades of ground mobility research. Its sister program, TRL6, proved, under statistically rigorous conditions, that behavior generation algorithms developed at Robotic Research had reached Technology Readiness Level 6. Under TRL6, the eXperimental Unmanned Vehicle (XUV) platforms were tested in three uncertain complex environments representative of a variety of battlefields. These included desert terrain (Tooele Army Depot, UT), Appalachian foothill terrain (Fort Indiantown Gap, PA) and urban terrain (MOUT site at FTIG, PA). In these trials, 563 km were traversed in 659 missions with 95% of distance being performed in autonomous mode using our behavior generation algorithms. The DEMO III autonomous software is the current benchmark in ground robotic autonomy.
SARTI, RTIA and CTA are three sister programs that are continuing the developing of the ground robotic systems. Robotic Research engineers have participated in all of these 3 programs.
