DARPA RACER fleet expands experimental phase

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) fleet has entered its next experimental phase.

Experiment 1 was executed March-April 2022 on six courses of combat-relevant terrain. The teams completed over 40 autonomous runs of about two miles each and reached speeds of just under 20 miles per hour.

The endeavor seeks to give driverless combat vehicles off-road autonomy while traveling at speeds keeping pace with those driven by people in realistic situations.

“Since the first experiment, teams have been working to improve perception of the environment and planning navigable routes through development of new autonomy algorithm technologies,” RACER Program Manager Stuart Young said. “The DARPA-provided RACER fleet vehicles being used in the program are high performance all-terrain vehicles outfitted with world-class sensing and computational abilities, but the teams’ focus is on computational solutions as that platform encounters increasingly complex off-road terrain.”

Experiment 2 requires teams to go beyond the environmental features found in the desert environment and incorporate new challenges that include larger and steeper hills while also creating longer-range plans amid driving through or around varied obstacles to successfully navigate courses.

“We are after driverless ground vehicles that can maneuver on unstructured off-road terrain at speeds that are only limited by considerations of sensor performance, mechanical constraints, and safety,” Young said. “At a minimum, the program goal is software performance that allows off-road speeds on par with a human driver.”