DEVCOM ARL FY22 Industry Autonomy Technology Assessment Final Report on Security and Mobility

Forces that will conduct missions for extended periods in expeditionary situations require technologies that are mobile, robust, and have sufficient autonomy to increase team effectiveness. The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory solicited solutions from industry that demonstrate autonomous mobility and autonomous security in operationally relevant scenarios.

February 1, 2023

Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD

An example of the technology evaluated for the security scenario during the technology evaluation. (Image: Army Research Laboratory)

During July 18-22, 2022, the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory, three companies, and numerous attendees from other government organizations gathered at the Robotics Research Collaboration Campus (R2C2) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, to demonstrate and evaluate ground robotics technologies with capabilities for protecting operating areas, personnel, and infrastructure in numerous types of environments and situations during its first ever Industry Autonomy Technology Assessment (IATA) event. This event reflects DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory’s commitment to collaborate in robotics research with academia, industry, and other government organizations.

The purpose of the IATA is to inform Army modernization efforts through innovation, discovery, demonstration, and experimentation of autonomy technologies and to accelerate the delivery of innovative capabilities to the warfighter. It provides an operationally relevant environment and problem set that enables technology developers to demonstrate new technologies and apply existing technologies in innovative ways. It also provides a means for the government to assess and provide feedback on performance of technologies for known gaps and emerging needs. The primary objective of the IATA is to identify and assess technologies that can accelerate solutions relevant to Army modernization priorities. The IATA presented an environment to examine and understand Army challenges and provide assessment data to participants on how their technologies address the challenges.

It was our intention to expose the technologies from each participating company to three vignette types, with multiple run types associated with each vignette:

Autonomy for Security: Urbanized Terrain
Autonomous Mobility
Autonomy for Security: Vegetated Trail Terrain

A total of three companies demonstrated their ground-based robotic technologiesduring the event. The companies who participated in the IATA were the following:

Asylon Robotics
Booz Allen Hamilton
Ghost Robotics/ARES Security

Attendees at the event included representatives from Air Force Research Laboratory, DEVCOM Armaments Center, ARL, John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, and the Test Resource Management Center. Support for the planning and execution of the IATA event was provided by Energetics Technology Center, Inc through its Partnership Intermediary Agreement with ARL. This report describes the site, vignettes, and assessment methods and provides feedback on the performance of the included technologies. To allow candid reporting of the performance of the robotic systems and to preclude attribution to a specific company’s technology, this report refers to Company A, B, and C, the order of which does not correlate to the order of the participant list.

This work was performed by Marshal Childers, John Millemaci, Anthony Barnett, Jacob Sepinuck, Christian Ellis, Craig Lennon, and Luis Hernandez for the Army Research Laboratory. For more information, download the Technical Support Package (free white paper) at mobilityengineeringtech.com/tsp under the Autonomy category. ARL-9582