DARPA asks industry to enable unmanned vehicles to operate at manned speeds

摘要

U.S. military researchers are kicking-off a potential $19.5 million project to develop machine autonomy that enables unmanned ground combat vehicles to maneuver safely over rough off-road terrain at speeds a human driver could achieve. Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., issued an updated broad agency announcement (HR001121S0004) for the Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program. Such a vehicle should be able to operate quickly over unstructured off-road terrain at speeds limited not by the autonomy software or processing time, but only by onboard sensor limitations, vehicle mechanical limits. Its speed should be similar to that of a human driver or a tele-operated vehicle.