Researchers take a new more efficient approach to designing machine autonomy for unmanned combat vehicles

Aug. 4, 2021
The SARA program is one of many Army initiatives working on getting artificial intelligence (AI) behind the steering wheel of its vehicles.

ADELPHI, Md. – The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Adelphi, Md., has begun using its own new autonomy stack to speed development of its unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) program during a one-year sprint. FedScoop reports. Continue reading original article

The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:

4 Aug. 2021 -- By owning its autonomy tech stack — all the layers of technology that support applications and development — rather than depending on a contractor for it, ARL has more control over its Scalable, Adaptive and Resilient Autonomy (SARA) program to improve how autonomous combat vehicles drive themselves.

Namely, it gave the lab more flexibility to assign research roles to partners to be more deliberate about what groups do and how they use the tech stack to fuse their efforts.

The SARA program kicked off its one-year sprint last year, working with eight collaborators from across the country that each was given a specific part of the complex world of machine autonomy to engineer new solutions to, instead of putting out broad requests for proposals.

Related: DARPA asks industry for simulation technology to enable machine autonomy of unmanned ground vehicles

Related: DARPA asks industry for machine autonomy algorithms to enable unmanned vehicles to operate at manned speeds

Related: Artificial intelligence and machine learning for unmanned vehicles

John Keller, chief editor
Military & Aerospace Electronics

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