Engineers at Science Applications International Corp. want to give battle smarts to a legion of robots.
The company, which goes by the acronym SAIC, is one of four lead contractors working on “perception systems” for rolling robots.
The company’s Center for Intelligent Systems has already begun developing prototype perception systems that not only let robots navigate, but let them distinguish obstacles. SAIC has used commercial off-road vehicles as its test beds.
Among other things, the systems employ active and passive sensors, data fusion and position estimation technology.
The systems under development would help the vehicle discern and react to off-road conditions common in military operations. The company plans tests in a variety of terrains and under various weather conditions.
Ideally, a military robot’s brain will be one that learns.
“Our goal is to develop a perception system that consistently yields acceptable performance without an operator or technical support and that also automatically improves its performance under a wide range of conditions,” says John Spofford, program manager at SAIC.
So far the SAIC team has $1.5 million for work on the Army Future Combat Systems project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The program is called PerceptOR.
SAIC’s partners on the project include Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh, the University of South Florida in Tampa, Applied Perception, Inc. of Wexford, Pa., and Visteon Corp. of Dearborn, Mich.
Three other teams are competing for the full project grant.
In the end, two teams will be able to advance through all three phases of the grant. Those teams will get as much as $10.2 million.
