In March, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency performed the third experiment in March for a program that seeks to demonstrate and assess the performance of combat-scale autonomous vehicles in off-road environments at the U.S. Army National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California.
Teams from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington participated in the three-week experiment as part of DARPA’s Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency program, the agency said Tuesday.
“At Experiment Three, we successfully demonstrated significant improvements in our off-road speeds while simultaneously reducing any interaction with the vehicle during test runs,” said Stuart Young, RACER program manager at DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office.
Army Research Laboratory researchers also took part in the experiment by demonstrating the performer team’s autonomy software.
Performer teams conducted more than 55 autonomous runs through challenging terrain with a dozen RACER fleet vehicles, logging 246 miles in 24.6 total hours and speeds of approximately 25 miles per hour.
“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,” noted Young.
Under the second phase, performers will further develop their software stacks and test the autonomous movement of their vehicles in longer off-road environments with fewer interactions.
