A US military programme has begun testing autonomous all-terrain vehicles without any human drivers on board 鈥� showing how robotic vehicles can race across rough landscapes dotted with dangerous obstacles.
The off-road robots navigated steep hills and ditches while avoiding rocks and trees as they sped across the Mojave desert at the US Army鈥檚 National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California. It was the third experiment in a project overseen by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), but the first time that the vehicles traversed off-road terrain without having human drivers sitting behind the wheel.
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鈥淲e take the human operator out of the vehicle, and [they act as] a safety operator from a chase vehicle,鈥� says at DARPA. 鈥淪o really, the robot is on its own.鈥�
Three teams from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the University of Washington in Seattle have been participating in DARPA鈥檚 Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program. The ultimate goal is to enable robotic vehicles to someday operate as scouts roaming ahead of fast-moving US military vehicle formations.
The teams have focused on developing the best computer algorithms to steer vehicles from point A to point B without the help of maps. Such algorithms have been tested on a dozen Polaris all-terrain vehicles outfitted by DARPA with a standard set of computing hardware and sensors.
The first two RACER experiments took place in March 2022 and September 2022, and had human drivers sitting on board as backup. For the third experiment, which took place from 12 to 17 March, the teams wanted to push the envelope with higher speeds on terrain marked by more rocks, gullies and even small canyons. For safety reasons, they decided to keep human drivers out of the vehicles.
鈥淲hen you鈥檙e driving quickly, and you鈥檙e within inches of rocks and if you make a small decision, you could break your vehicle,鈥� says Young. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 a risk we have to take, but at least it鈥檚 a risk to materiel and not to humans.鈥�
In the latest experiment, teams completed 55 driverless runs across distances ranging between 6 and 18 kilometres. Although the autonomous vehicles slowed down in rougher terrain, they hit maximum speeds of 40 kilometres per hour on dirt or gravel trails.
The vehicles sometimes broke components of their suspension systems after hitting rocks or going into a ditch at higher speeds. But most of these incidents involved minor damage that was 鈥渆asily repairable鈥�, and each team had three vehicles to use in case one was down for repairs, says Young.
With the first phase of the RACER programme completed, the second phase will move to testing autonomous versions of larger vehicles that have tracks and treads like those used by military tanks. Young hopes to see the self-driving algorithms get better at planning safe routes when they detect challenging terrain coming up ahead, along with improving their capability to spot rough trail markers such as ruts worn into the ground.
