US DARPA Off-Road Vehicles Autonomous Teams Navigate the Third Test
The DARPA Robotic Autonomy in complex Environments with Resilience (RACER), a program of the U.S. Department of Defense, recently conducted its third test to evaluate the performance off-road unmanned vehicle. The test runs were conducted from March 12 to 27. They included the first completely uninhabited RACER Fleet Vehicles with a safety driver in a chase vehicle. The RACER program aims to demonstrate autonomous vehicle movement in mission-relevant, complex off-road environments which are more unpredictable than road conditions. The U.S. Army National Training Center’s (NTC) at Ft. Irwin in California hosted the multiple courses in the unforgiving and challenging terrain of the Mojave desert. In the same way as at previous events, teams from Carnegie Mellon University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory participated. The project’s initial phase was completed.

We provided the performers with RACER fleet cars that had common performance, sensor, and compute. We can compare the performance of the performer teams autonomy software to that of humans in similar environments. \”In this latest experiment we continued to push the vehicle’s limits in perception of environments to greater distances. This will enable further increases in speeds and better adaption to newly encountered conditions, which will continue in RACER’s next phase.\”

\”At Experiment Three we demonstrated significant improvements in off-road speed while simultaneously reducing interaction with the vehicle. \”We were honored to have representatives of the Army and Marine Corps attend the experiment in order to facilitate the transition of technologies developed by RACER into future unmanned service initiatives and concepts,\” stated Stuart Young, program manager for RACER in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office.

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US DARPA RACER Off-Road Autonomous Vehicles Teams Navigate Third Test