The U.S. Army has provided $2.9M in funds to eight industry and academic partners to develop and implement prototypes into testbed systems under an Army Research Laboratory initiative.
The Scalable, Adaptive and Resilient Autonomy program seeks to accelerate research efforts in autonomous mobility in efforts to optimize decision-making capacities in austere environments through the usage of intelligent systems, the Army said Wednesday.
“Robotic and autonomous systems need the ability to enter into an unfamiliar area, without the ability to communicate and for which there are no maps showing terrain or structures, make sense of the environment, and perform safely and effectively at the Army’s operational tempo,” said Eric Spero, SARA program manager.
The program's initial sprint will focus on the rapid development of off-road maneuver technologies to address the Army's modernization objectives, while succeeding sprints will cover human-agent teaming as well as collaborative and heterogeneous behaviors.
The awardees are:
- Colorado School of Mines
- Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition
- General Electric
- Indiana University
- University of California, Berkeley
- University of Delaware
- University of Rochester
- University of Washington
