Six companies won a total of $4.3 million in December to integrate their robotic software with the Army's modular open system for ground vehicle autonomy.
Charles River Analytics, Leidos, Neya Systems, Scientific Systems Company and Soar Technology all won awards worth about $750,000 from the Combat Vehicle Robotics Increment 3 program. A sixth company, Stratom, won a $545,000 award.
Each company will integrate new functions into the Robotic Technology Kernel or Warfighter Machine Interface, Jason Bagnall, deputy program manager for combat vehicle robots, wrote in an email last month to Inside Defense.
Those platforms make up the Army’s modular open system for the control and function of autonomous ground vehicles, including the planned Robotic Combat Vehicles.
“Contractor technical contributions are in diverse areas such as speech processing and natural-language processing, speech-based control of decentralized robotic teams, advanced robotic path planning, enhanced perception, and adaptable motion control,” Bagnall wrote.
Stratom will create three new pieces of software from its award, company officials said during a Jan. 19 call with Inside Defense:
- One program will help autonomous vehicles perceive dust and vegetation in front of cameras and lidar sensors.
- Another will create a profile management package, which would more easily allow operators to set parameters for vehicles in particular environments. For example, a vehicle could drive faster on an empty tarmac than in a crowded off-road setting.
- The third program will build a vehicle simulation environment.
Once Stratom finishes and tests the applications, the Army will retain the rights to use them on future vehicles in perpetuity, according to Mark Gordon, the company’s chief executive officer. The Army also has the right to hire someone else to make future upgrades to the programs.
The code that powers the software must have enough documentation for programmers outside the company to read it in the future, to support testing and future modifications, he said.
Army officials have said their open system for robotic technology will make it cheaper for the service to add future robotic capabilities, and that it will make it easier for new competitors to sell to the Army. A new company can offer a particular function for the robots, rather than building an entire robotic control system or integrating with a proprietary system.
Stratom’s business model for off-road autonomy relies upon its ability to continuously deliver expanded or upgraded functions through software, Gordon said.
“The government is always looking to increase their capabilities, address issues that they perceive,” he said. “We’ll probably never be reselling the same widget over and over again. It’s going to be more about continually developing and helping mature the capability.”
Off-road autonomy software probably will not reach a level of static maturity, where no upgrades are needed, in the next few decades, Gordon said.
There are also some commercial applications for off-road autonomy software, including in agriculture, mining and construction, he said.
Neya Systems will add an advanced track placement system to the Army’s Robotic Technology Kernel, which will help autonomous vehicles move faster and more fluidly on off-road terrain, company officials said in a Jan. 21 call.
The software will allow tracked ground robots to survey the upcoming terrain and incorporate the placement of both tracks into choosing the best path, according to Kurt Bruck, division manager for Neya.
Ultimately, the goal is for an autonomous ground vehicle to drive as fast as an experienced soldier over off-road terrain, he said. This project should be a stepping stone toward that goal.
“Right now, autonomy is very cautious, vehicles go very slowly,” Bruck said. “If you look at how a human operator of a vehicle drives, they can go very fast, and it’s very smooth.”
Neya has previously provided software that helps the Army’s autonomous vehicles plot a path around obstacles when they drive off-road, but this new project will extend that software and improve the vehicle’s ability to consider tread placement, he said.
The software can consider the characteristics of the vehicle it is driving, so that it could work with everything from small robots to humvees and multiton combat vehicles, said Andrew Capodieci, the company’s robotics integration team lead.
The Army’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center made the awards through the service’s existing other transaction agreement with the National Advanced Mobility Consortium. The MITRE Corporation will evaluate the programs before they are added to the robotic software platform.
Charles River, Scientific Systems and Soar Technology did not respond to questions for this story. A Leidos spokesman declined to comment.