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The research agency has deployed autonomous vehicles in off-road environments as part of a broader program to develop next-generation land combat capability.
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has conducted an experiment aimed at testing the resilience of driverless combat vehicles as part of the Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program.
The trial, undertaken at Camp Roberts, California from 15 to 27 September, involved deploying the vehicles at speeds comparable to vehicles driven by military personnel in challenging off-road environments.
The exercise was supported by Carnegie Mellon University, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the University of Washington, which each developed autonomous software stacks for the DARPA-provided robot systems.
This was the second test, following “Experiment 1”, which was conducted at Fort Irwin, California in March and April of 2022.
Experiment 1 involved operating the vehicles across six courses of combat-relevant terrain, with teams completing more than 40 autonomous runs of about 3.2 kilometres each, reaching speeds of approximately 32 kilometres per hour.
Challenges included identifying, classifying, and avoiding obstacles at higher speeds.
Obstacles included rocks, bushes, and ditches, as well as non-debilitating impediments, causing limited damage to the vehicle.
“Since the first experiment, teams have been working to improve perception of the environment and planning navigable routes through development of new autonomy algorithm technologies,” Stuart Young, RACER program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, said.
“The DARPA-provided RACER fleet vehicles being used in the program are high performance all-terrain vehicles outfitted with world-class sensing and computational abilities, but the teams’ focus is on computational solutions as that platform encounters increasingly complex off-road terrain.”
Current trials as part of Experiment 2 involve requiring teams to go beyond the environmental features found in the desert environment.
This is expected to incorporate larger and steeper hills, aimed at assessing whether the vehicles can maintain control, particularly when travelling down steep slopes, on slippery surfaces, and navigating ditches.
The teams have also been tasked with creating longer range plans while driving through or around such varied obstacles in order to successfully navigate the courses.
“We are after driverless ground vehicles that can manoeuvre on unstructured off-road terrain at speeds that are only limited by considerations of sensor performance, mechanical constraints, and safety,” Young added.
“At a minimum, the program goal is software performance that allows off-road speeds on par with a human driver.”
[Related: DARPA launches X-Plane project ]
