Robotic Research LLC has added Retrotraverse to its AutoDrive-M autonomy kit. The autonomy kit is equipped on the U.S. Army’s Palettized Load System (PLS) logistics trucks.
Robotic Research demonstrated the Retrotraverse capabilities with three of the U.S. Army’s PLS trucks, each towing trailers. “This is a major step forward for our company and has broad application both in autonomy and platooning. The capability solves the potentially life-threatening problem of an autonomous platoon of military vehicles being unable to navigate out of a dangerous situation,” said Alberto Lacaze, president of Robotic Research. “This automated platooning capability will ultimately extend the reach of soldiers without putting them in harm’s way.”
The Retrotraverse feature allows a platoon of heavy-duty trucks with trailers to autonomously reverse. Several autonomous vehicle providers in the trucking industry are demonstrating platooning in benign conditions, where the weather is ideal and road surfaces are smooth and marked.
Robotic Research has been specifically focusing on addressing the edge cases, such as poor weather, dust and off-road conditions, to ensure a robust autonomous system that is necessary for operating in all conditions and during mission-critical operations for the military.
If a platoon drives into a dead end, or similar edge case where it cannot make a U-turn, the platoon of vehicles with trailers needs to be able to reverse out of the situation. Retrotraverse can make this happen.
“Anyone who has backed up a truck with a trailer knows how difficult it is to navigate,” said Joe Putney, director of commercial systems at Robotic Research. “The autonomous Retrotraverse feature was able to reverse a truck and trailer faster than even our most skilled drivers. This feature is not just lifesaving, it’s time-saving, and it has the ability to reduce one of the greatest pains truck drivers have.”
In 2018, Robotic Research was awarded a three-year, $49.7 million contract by the U.S. Army to provide its autonomy kit for large convoy resupply vehicles. Robotic Research has since delivered nearly 100 unmanned platooning trucks.
In the United States, trucking companies and the Army are both developing systems to automate moving groups of trucks. While trucking companies are mostly interested in “platoons” of trucks drafting off of each other to save fuel, the Army wants its “convoyed” trucks to be hundreds of meters apart to improve their chances of surviving an enemy attack.
Battlefield challenges
While the biggest danger for platoons of commercial trucks is crashing, military convoys can be threatened by attacks with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or rocket-propelled grenades.
Civilian truck drivers also benefit from a robust infrastructure, said Bernard Theisen, division chief for Ground Vehicle Robotics at the U.S. Army’s Ground Vehicles Systems Center (GVSC). For example, nearly all platooning trucks are limited to using roads and highways that have been mapped at centimeter-level resolution with lidar, can communicate over 3G or 4G networks, and have excellent GNSS signals. “I would love to have all that information,” Theisen said, “every time I send a robotic convoy vehicle out there.”
By contrast, the military must design a system that assumes “no comms, no prior data, and no infrastructure,” Theisen explained. “Sometimes a bridge that used to be there has been blown up or we may have put a new bridge across the water overnight. A building that was there yesterday got blown up and is now blocking the road. You cannot pre-plan that in the map and expect it not to change.”
Nevertheless, the civilian and military efforts share some challenges, Theisen acknowledged, including “perceiving the world, understanding it, processing the data, and making the right decisions.” Unlike robots, humans are very good at coping with the unexpected. “You can only train a robot so much, there will always be situations that it does not know how to handle.”
In a military convoy, every fourth or fifth truck may have a mounted gun to protect the convoy. The convoy will typically include one or more ambulances, wreckers and fuel tankers. “It is a different application than for Amazon or FedEx to send a couple of trucks down the highway,” Theisen said.
Leader-follower
In leader-follower applications, GVSC installs the same hardware on all its trucks. “This facilitates software maintenance, because you don’t need to have different versions,” Theisen said. If the convoy’s leader is disabled from a mechanical or battlefield issue, it is easy for a soldier on the next truck to authorize his truck to take over as the convoy’s new leader. “We have also created cases where the leader takes that road months ahead of the followers,” said Alberto Lacaze, co-founder and president of Robotic Research. “So, the leader does not need to be a part of the convoy.”
Rough terrain doesn’t affect navigation, except that in hilly terrain trucks might have more side-to-side drift than in a flat area. “We often use a three-axis IMU [inertial measurement unit] instead of a two-axis IMU, which might be all you need for a commercial application on flat roads,” Theisen said.
“The commercial problem is almost like carrying a group of trailers that are not mechanically connected,” Lacaze said. It is crucial to be able to tie in the vehicles’ low-level controls so that they maintain a very short separation. If those vehicles were trying too hard to maintain those very close distances by frequently accelerating and decelerating, the fuel-savings advantages from drafting would go away. By contrast, for military applications the exact distance between the trucks doesn’t matter much, but their side-to-side error does. “You would like all vehicles to be driving within one tire width of the lead vehicle’s tracks,” Lacaze said. “That has many advantages — for example, if that road has been demined.”
While commercial and military software largely overlap, their sensor requirements are fundamentally different. “Most commercial vehicles are not checking to see whether there is a crater in the middle of the road,” Lacaze said. Military vehicles need to detect such damage to the infrastructure and respond quickly.
Still, the military is interested in “the gigantic amount of mapping of the available infrastructure” being done by private companies, Lacaze said, because most military convoys are not in war-torn areas, but delivering materiel to bases in areas with some infrastructure.
Robotic modes
GVSC purchases commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) systems and integrates them into its trucks, Theisen explained, producing five robotic modes:
Warning, which consists of “idiot lights” and buzzers alerting human drivers that, for example, they are straying out of a lane or are about to hit something
Driver assist mode, which helps drivers brake, accelerate and steer
Teleoperation, which consists of driving the truck from a remote location
Waypoint navigation, which uses a GNSS waypoint path that can either be pre-programmed or pre-driven and then replayed
Leader-follower, in which the first vehicle leads and potentially any number of vehicles follow.
Regarding the driver assist mode, Theisen pointed out that “all these features are very common in high-end cars and you are seeing them coming into many Class 8 trucks. We don’t do any development in the Army from that standpoint.” Regarding the leader-follower mode, the first truck can be driven in any of the other four modes.
GVSC is the lead system integrator for 30 robotic palletized loading systems (PLSs) that the Army has at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and another 30 at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Nevertheless, a human driver usually leads the robotic convoy. The driver determines the best route, assesses the situation, and is normally followed by three unmanned systems. “That is why we call our system semi-autonomous,” Theisen said.
The role of GNSS
The Olli shuttle, equipped with Robotic Research’s AutoDrive kit, is deployed on busy boardwalks, campuses and public roads. (Photo: Robotic Research)
For both commercial platooning and military convoying, GNSS signals are used for redundancy but not as the primary source of measurement of the distance between the trucks. “None of the systems that we have deployed on the commercial side — for example, with Local Motors vehicles (the Olli shuttle) — rely on GNSS,” Lacaze said, though they will use those signals if available. The high accuracy of their inertial systems make it hard to spoof or jam GNSS receivers, because the system would detect any changes in the GNSS solution and the vehicles would continue running on inertial navigation if the GNSS signal were jammed.
“We assume that we will not have GNSS information because sometimes we are jamming ourselves or are being jammed or the enemy could be spoofing us,” Theisen said. Most of GVSC’s systems use “nav boxes” sold by multiple vendors that enable vehicles to navigate for long periods without GNSS signals. They typically combine one or two GNSS receivers, an IMU or several smaller ones, a combination of wheel encoders or ground sensors to determine ground speed, and a digital compass.
GVSC’s trucks also use lidar to generate voxel maps of their current surroundings, and then share them with the other trucks in the convoy. Each vehicle tracks the vehicle in front of it and can just follow it, if it has insufficient position information or good visual cues.
GVSC looks for the highest possible GNSS accuracy, whether using civilian GNSS receivers or military Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module (SAASM) units. “We also take advantage of the future M-code,” Theisen said. “We do have capabilities that the civilian marketplace does not have.”
Remaining obstacles
The remaining bottleneck in the development and implementation of convoys of autonomous military vehicles is the approval process, Lacaze said. “Currently, if we make changes to the autonomy systems, the testing parts of the government are asking us to drive hundreds of thousands of miles before providing approvals. It is still a challenge to figure out at what point these vehicles are safe enough to provide to the soldiers and what the cost of doing so is.”
For these systems to take off, better processors, sensors (cameras, radars and lidars) and algorithms are required, Theisen said. “There is way more sensor data that you can collect and process in real time.”
Featured photo, provided by Robotic Research: Army convoys can stretch for miles. The U.S. Army’s Autonomous Ground Resupply trucks shown here are connected with Robotic Research’s autonomous technology.
A new system, called WarLoc, makes it possible to locate warfighters and first responders in GPS-denied environments.
Created by Robotic Research, a manufacturer of autonomy and robotic technology, the system provides localization and positioning data for teams entering underground facilities and traveling inside buildings and in urban canyons.
According to the company, multiple systems — including, besides WarLoc, robotic systems, UAVs and manned vehicles equipped with its technology — collaborate to enhance accuracy and maintain the localization of teams.
Its system, the company said, is unique in that “it has very small 3D position error in such a small package” and its filtering algorithms, rather than being centralized, are “distributed and opportunistic in nature to provide the best solution given the communications available.”
In January, Robotic Research received a $16.5-million order for WarLoc from the U.S. Army Product Manager Sets, Kits, Outfits and Tools (PM SKOT) to support forward-deployed U.S. military personnel. The company will deliver the WarLoc units to equip four deployed U.S. Army Brigade Combat Teams. The first batch has been shipped. The procuring organization, PM SKOT, provides Army and Joint Services oversight of the lifecycle for all sets, kits, outfits and tools used by U.S. soldiers.
Distributed System
A self-contained localization system typically relies on GNSS signals, when available, complemented by inertial navigation. By contrast, the WarLoc is a distributed system meant to work as a team, said Alberto Lacaze, Robotic Research’s co-founder and president. The problem, he explains, is how to filter these devices. Centralized approaches, in which every device sends its information to a central computer that does all the filtering, “work very well for an incident commander with a group of first responders going into a building, where the distances are relatively small.” However, he pointed out, they do not work when communications go down.
The alternative approach is to filter the information opportunistically, in a distributed fashion, which is what WarLoc does. In GPS-denied environments, “there is a process that synchronizes all the nodes once the communications have been established,” Lacaze said. “However, if you have, for example, two team members that are each in their own radio bubble, their solutions will continue to be optimized and other team members might be in their own bubbles, so their solution is also being optimized. If these two teams get in contact, their information will get synchronized and collectively optimized.”
The system, he adds, is “heavily reliant on the inertial solution and dead reckoning.” The more units can communicate and share data, the more accurate the navigation solution is. “In a relatively small package, we can achieve better than 1% error of distance traveled for a single unit,” said Lacaze. “Once you have multiple units communicating and measuring with each other, the solution gets significantly better.”
WarLoc, which contains all the required hardware and software, connects to a system used by first responders and the Department of Defense’s Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK) also being used in GPS-enabled areas. “Our system can be used not only for tracking humans, but also for tracking animals and other devices, such as robotic systems or vehicles,” Lacaze said.
Relative Localization
On the commercial side, the company has created a kit for autonomous shuttles and is deploying it in about 20 cities around the world. Like WarLoc, this device also works in GPS-denied areas, such as on an underground shuttle on a university campus. “We just won a contract to automate the busses that go through the Lincoln Tunnel,” Lacaze said.
Busses or shuttles using Robotic Research’s system “learn landmarks in the area that they are traversing and use them as an aid in localization, in conjunction with inertial units,” Lacaze said. “The vehicles learn their surroundings.” They don’t care about their absolute position, he explained, only about their relative position with respect to those areas. This is similar to pre-GPS directions like “Make a left at the post office, then a right at the gas station.” They can also use a common landmark. “If the first vehicle is seeing a certain building and knows its lat/long and the second vehicle saw that building some time ago, it can measure its distance from it using its own inertial system.”
While warfighters communicate their position information via their personal tactical radios to ATAK, which then shares it through its current radio infrastructure, vehicles on the road communicate it through dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) radio, a cell network, or some other network.
Other Robotic Research Programs
Robotic Research’s technology supports a range of robotics and autonomous vehicles in GPS-denied environments, including shuttles and buses for public transportation, hybrid unmanned aerial and ground vehicles (UAVs and UGVs), and trucks in the U.S. Army Autonomous Ground Resupply (AGR) Expedient Leader-Follower program.
The company is the prime contractor on several Army programs, including AGR, which consists of robotic trucks that the Army will begin to deploy. “We have delivered close to 100 of those trucks,” said Lacaze. “So, for example, if you are in a convoy and you need to know whether your warfighters are inside or outside a truck, WarLoc can tell you.”
Robotic Research’s AutoDrive autonomy kit, which can be retrofitted to vehicles of all sizes, provides autonomous functionality on surfaces ranging from urban-improved roads to off-road terrain, while the vehicle collects and analyzes data. The technology provides automation to one of the largest international shuttle providers as well as to the largest U.S. manufacturer of commercial buses, according to the company.
In February, the company announced it will begin testing totally unmanned, fully autonomous, low-speed shuttles in the second quarter of this year. It will initially involve attendants in fixed on-site locations, then will aim to move attendants to an offsite safety-monitoring facility.
D.C.-area engineering firm produces reusable face shields for region’s hospitals, offers sterile 3D printer patent for COVID applications globally
The team of engineers at Robotic Research LLC, based in Clarksburg, Maryland, is applying its innovative engineering expertise to create new solutions for healthcare workers to help fight the COVID-19 crisis in the Washington area and around the world.
Robotic Research is a provider of autonomy and robotic technologies for government and commercial customers.
The company has created a unique design for reusable face shields and is providing the shields to healthcare teams in hospitals around the Greater Washington Metro area. The company also just opened up its patented design of its sterile 3D printer by waiving licensing fees globally for any application of the printers related to fighting the current public health pandemic.
Face shields
Face shield printed for health-care workers to help fight COVID-19. (Photo: Robotic Research)
The face shields, which Robotic Research is printing on standard industrial 3D printers at its robotics engineering facility in Clarksburg, are being delivered to support teams at hospitals in the Montgomery County area.
The face shield design provides comfort and protection, and features an improved disinfection process capability using materials compatible with hospital cleaning methods. The design has been approved for use in select departments, with broader uses under evaluation.
“Our team wanted to help out in any way we could to support the local frontline health-care providers who are working around the clock to assist those impacted by the COVID-19 public health crisis,” said Alberto Lacaze, president of Robotic Research. “We are producing a face shield that modifies a design based off the blueprint provided by the National Institutes of Health. The design includes some enhancements to further protect from aerosol in the temple area and allow the masks to be cleaned and therefore reusable, as well as comfortable to wear over prolonged use.”
Robotic Research has sourced materials from across the country to support the production of approximately 2,000 face shields. The company is seeking a grant through Montgomery County and the state of Maryland to boost production to approximately 500 shields a day. The company normally uses its standard 3D printers to support many of its robotic products and solutions.
Sterile 3D printer
A batch of face shields prepared fo delivered to a Maryland hospital. (Photo: Robotic Research)
Materials used for polymer 3D printing are often damaged by the high temperatures, chemicals or radiation used in standard sterilization processes. Robotic Research’s patented process overcomes this challenge by using a sterile chamber around a 3D printer where unsterilized plastic is brought into the chamber.
The possibly contaminated plastic is sterilized by the printing process and packaged maintaining the sterile field.
This system was initially designed for a U.S. government agency to allow sterile medical materials to be printed at locations where commonly used sterilization methods might not be possible.
“Because this printer can create sterile materials, which are sterile from the inside out once produced, we are eliminating the need for hospitals to re-sterilize equipment before use,” Lacaze said. “At a time when efficiency and supplies are critical, we hope this technology will be able to help alleviate some of the immense pressure hospitals and medical facilities are currently facing. It is our hope that providing the use of this process at no cost may help bring solutions to the health care teams working to save lives during this crisis.”
The unique printer process enables the manufacturing of sterile medical equipment and implantable device components, such as intubation tubes and other materials required during invasive procedures, in a manner that eliminates the need for additional sterilization.
Robotic Research’s patented sterile 3D printing process (USPTO 10,406,758) will be available royalty-free for a minimum of one year for any COVID-19 applications across the globe.
The company is committed to continuing to use its resources and facilities to develop solutions for the ongoing challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A roundup of recent products in the GNSS and inertial positioning industry from the March 2020 issue of GPS World magazine.
OEM
NavIC modules
Support both L1 and L5 bands
Photo: Allystar
The dual-band multi-GNSS modules TAU1202 and TAU1205 support both the L1 and L5 bands to enhance sub-meter positioning accuracy. Constellations received include GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou, QZSS and NavIC. Besides the L1 band, TAU1202 and TAU1205 also support L5/B2a/E5a, which are expected to have lower noise and significantly reduced multipath mitigation because of the higher chipping rate of L5 signals relative to L1 C/A code. TAU1205 supports NavIC (IRNSS), improving navigation in India and the Middle East. Powered by the Cynosure III GNSS chipset and with built-in low-noise amplifier and surface acoustic wave (SAW) filter, TAU1202 and TAU1205 provide higher sensitivity, ensuring exceptional acquisition and tracking performance even in weak signal areas.
The BCM47765 dual-frequency GNSS module is capable of using the BeiDou-3 constellation’s B2a signals (the Chinese indicator for L5). It can track 30 new L5 signals (60% more) with a significant impact on accuracy. End users will experience much higher reliability of the submeter accuracy inherent to dual-frequency L1/L5. The enhanced L5 signal improves the accuracy of GNSS in an urban scenario by mitigating reflections from nearby buildings (multipath). It also improves GNSS in an open-sky scenario, allowing for submeter accuracy. Second generation dual-frequency GNSS will enable lane-level driving navigation, allowing applications to know in which highway lane a vehicle travels.
The MAC-SA5X miniaturized rubidium atomic clock is a high-performance atomic clock that delivers a wide thermal range, critical performance improvements and other enhancements over previous clocks. The MAC-SA5X produces a stable time and frequency reference that maintains a high degree of synchronization to a reference clock, such as a GNSS-derived signal. Its low monthly drift rate, short-term stability and stability during temperature changes allows the device to maintain precise frequency and timing during extended periods of holdover during GNSS outages or for applications where large rack-mounted clocks are not possible. Operating over a temperature range of –40 to +75 Celsius, the MAC-SA5X is designed to quickly achieve atomic stability performance with a fast lock.
The NEO-D9S GNSS correction data receiver module provides an affordable approach to bringing centimeter-level accuracy to GNSS receivers. The NEO-D9S receives corrections from correction service providers broadcast on the L-band (1525–1559 MHz). A host processor can then decrypt this correction data and provide it to a high-precision GNSS receiver, combining corrections directly with readings from the satellite constellations to enable much more accurate position readings than those offered by GNSS signals alone. Use of the NEO-D9S will also increase the availability of high-precision GNSS positioning data in areas with limited connectivity and reduce the amount of cellular data consumed by positioning receivers. Expected customers are Tier 1 and OEM carmakers, industrial system integrators, and any other applications that rely on very accurate positioning at low cost. The NEO-D9S module is a correction-only receiver. Based on the latest u-blox ninth-generation (D9) platform, it will integrate easily with the u-blox F9 RTK GNSS receivers from u-blox, or can be used as part of a modular product roadmap.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G, 662 and 460 enable enhanced user experiences across connectivity, gaming and entertainment. The new mobile platforms support dual-frequency (L1 and L5) GNSS to improve location positioning accuracy and robustness. The system-on-chip solutions also support NavIC. For the first time on mobile, the Qualcomm Location Suite supports up to seven satellite constellations concurrently, including NavIC.
Dedicated to surveying and agriculture, the UAV Birdie is tailor-made, combining intuitive use and high-quality data through precise sensors and GPS RTK L1/L2 onboard. Features include a 24-megapixel camera or optional full-frame 42-megapixel camera; flight time up to 60 minutes; and coverage up to 8 square kilometers in one flight. A vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) upgrade is available.
Skyfront’s Perimeter 8 drone is equipped with Silvus Technologies’ SteamCaster Radio system, a powerful user-customizable radio system for the military, police and broadcast. The new long-range drone will allow operators to inspect pipelines and other assets as well as conduct long-range surveillance missions. The octocopter can fly for five hours and travel up to 100 kilometers without losing connection from the ground station. Currently, five models are available to suit uses including mapping, lidar and medium, long, or extra-long surveillance. SteamCaster radio system uses the latest beam-forming technology, spatial multiplexing, and space-time coding to ensure the drone can be controlled in environments in which other radio systems are likely to fail. The combination of the technologies allows the range to be increased from 40% to 100%. SteamCaster comes with SteamScape, a network management interface to allow for key metrics and statistics to be viewed and collected in real time. The system also allows the drone to be overlayed onto a map showing the current location and path of the drone.
Delivers critical tools on the ground or in the air
Photo: Robotic Research
The Pegasus Mini is a smaller version of the Pegasus, a hybrid unmanned aircraft system/unmanned ground vehicle. The Pegasus hybrid UAS/UGV configuration delivers advanced GPS-denied mapping with fully autonomous high-speed flying and driving capabilities. Pegasus Mini is designed to provide the extra reach that a UAV or UGV alone cannot provide. Uses include inspection, rescue, rapid response, and applications that strongly benefit organizations in oil and gas, public transportation, law enforcement, public safety, and more.
The Silent Falcon E1 UAV has completed 500 hours of successful flight testing and operations. It’s maker, Silent Falcon UAS Technologies (SFUAS), is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The E1 solar-electric, fixed-wing UAV is noise free, emission free, and provides long-range, low-cost intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capability. It has a payload capacity of 20 pounds and a ceiling of 20,000 feet above ground level. SFUAS has an application pending before the FAA for type certification of the E1. The 500-hour milestone confirms for federal regulators that it is safe and durable. Silent Falcon aircraft have operated in eight foreign countries and are not ITAR restricted.
The High Definition (HD) GNSS cloud-based solution enables mass-market devices to achieve sub-meter accuracy across the globe. HD GNSS enables lane-level navigation, augmented reality and virtual reality. It combines precise point positioning (PPP) and real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning methods, allowing for fast convergence time, high availability and global coverage. It also supports off-the-shelf mobile devices and internet of things (IoT) trackers equipped with dual-frequency chipsets.
The OpenRTK330L GNSS/INS module is designed for developers creating guidance and navigation systems for autonomous vehicles, robots, drones, industrial, construction and agricultural machinery. OpenRTK330L is a low-cost, high-performance triple-band RTK/GNSS receiver coupled with redundant inertial sensor arrays to provide cm-level accuracy, enhanced reliability, and superior performance during GNSS outages. The module is aimed at automotive, robot, drone, construction and agriculture systems. The multi-band GNSS receiver can monitor all global constellations (GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS, NavIC, SBAS) and simultaneously track up to 80 channels. The module has RF and baseband support for the L1, L2 and L5 GPS bands and their international constellation signal equivalents.
Robotic Research LLC, a leading provider of autonomy and robotic technologies, will begin testing fully autonomous low-speed shuttles that are totally unmanned in the second quarter of this year.
Current commercial applications of low-speed shuttles use onboard safety attendants to monitor the safety inside and outside the vehicle. Robotic Research plans to start testing without onboard attendants.
The first step is to have the attendants in fixed on-site locations, with the future goal to move attendants to an offsite safety monitoring facility.
“Through our work with the U.S. government over the past four years, we have already demonstrated that fully autonomous trucks are a reality. We are committed to making our shuttle and bus manufacturing partners successful by accelerating state-of-the-art technologies for unmanned vehicles ahead of regulatory agencies’ progress,” said Alberto Lacaze, president of Robotic Research.
“The level of safety certification and redundancy necessary to drive fully autonomous vehicles is a significant undertaking that needs to be designed from the top down. Just adding more ADAS is not a reasonable or cost-effective pathway to full autonomy,” Lacaze said. “The advancements driven by the Robotic Research team will provide a product that significantly reduces the cost of operation and therefore improves market size.”
Current local, state and federal regulations for most commercial shuttle operations require the safety attendant to be inside the cab of the vehicle. However, many transit operators are seeking to change these regulations to allow remote attendants to oversee system safety operations. The change is integral to the viability of low-speed shuttles, which are an innovative solution to the first/last mile problem, which is the distance between a traveler’s origin or destination, and a transit station or stop.
Robotic Research has been developing and testing unmanned, autonomous operations for a wide range of vehicles for nearly a decade. The company currently provides autonomy kits that fully automate logistics convoy trucks for the U.S. government and several of its allied nation partners. Nearly 100 trucks have already been delivered. The tests for these vehicles have included operations with no safety attendants on board, with a single operator monitoring three unmanned vehicles.
Robotic Research’s AutoDrive autonomy kit is platform agnostic and can be retrofitted to vehicles of all sizes, from small, portable robots to large trucks and buses. The system provides autonomous functionality on surfaces ranging from urban-improved roads to off-road terrain, all while the vehicle is collecting and analyzing data to better enhance the future of autonomous vehicles and transportation.
Robotic Research’s technology provides automation to one of the largest international shuttle providers as well as to the largest U.S. manufacturer of commercial buses. The company’s AutoDrive kit also supports various autonomy programs in commercial and government sectors and is currently operating in communities and cities around the globe, including 30 states and four continents.
The system provides accurate, absolute and relative 3D (six-degrees-of-freedom, or 6 DOF) localization information for ground vehicles of all sizes.
The device delivers exceptional localization performance in GPS‐denied or compromised areas. It is designed specifically for use on unmanned ground vehicles and is heavily customizable to incorporate a wide variety of sensor inputs into the navigation solution.
Robotic Research develops and deploys autonomous vehicle innovations for both commercial and government customers.
Features of the RR-N-140 include:
Accurate, real-time navigation/localization solution for wheeled or tracked ground vehicles
Adaptable for use on surface vessels
Exceptional localization performance in GPS-denied or compromised areas
Dual antenna GNSS for zero-speed heading detection and redundancy
Rugged IP67 Construction designed to meet shock and vibration environments typical of military vehicles
Up to 4X configurable vehicle speed / encoder inputs
Configurable GNSS and IMU options allow tailored solutions for all levels of performance
Customizable to directly interface with and process a variety of sensor inputs (e.g. LADAR, Stereo and Monocular Cameras, Ultra-Wideband Ranging Radios)
Easy integration with the Robotic Research Warfighter Localization family of systems (WarLoc)
Web interface for user-level diagnostics and configuration
Ethernet, CANbus, and RS-232 Serial Data Interfaces
Independent Ethernet ports for separation of navigation solution and sensor processing data
Robust Built-in-test (BIT) error reporting during runtime
Redundant IMU and GNSS options available for fault-tolerance
NTP Server and GPS PPS signals for time synchronization
