Contractors for PerceptOR Program announced

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Army have announced the contractors receiving contracts under the Perception for Off Road Robots (PerceptOR) program. PerceptOR is one of six key supporting technology programs of the DARPA/Army Future Combat Systems (FCS) program.

The winning contractor teams are listed below.

• Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), McLean, VA, was awarded $1.5 million under agreement MDA972-01-9-0015 on March 21, 2001. Team members include: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, Applied Perception Inc., and Visteon Corp.
  
• General Dynamics Robotic Systems Inc., Westminster, MD, was awarded $1,499,998 under agreement MDA972-01-9-0013 on March 14, 2001. Team members include: PercepTek, Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, NIST - The Intelligent Systems Division (ISD), and University of Maryland (UMD)
  
• Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, was awarded $1.5 million under agreement MDA972-01-9-0016 on March 16, 2001. Team members include: Sarnoff Corporation, Rockwell Science Center, The Boeing Company, and RedZone Robotics
  
• The Robotics for Perception Mobility (RPM) Consortium, led by SRI Consulting, Menlo Park, CA, was awarded $1.4 million under agreement MDA972-01-9-0014 on March 9, 2001. Consortium members include: SRI International, Omnitech Robotics, NIST, AmDyne, ActivMedia, Veridian/ERIM, and EigenPoint

The PerceptOR program will develop prototype approaches to advance the state-of-the-art for off-road obstacle detection for robotic systems and enable higher levels of autonomous mobility needed for FCS operations. The robotic systems envisioned for FCS must be able to operate with minimal human intervention while navigating in a variety of off-road terrains and weather conditions. Perception approaches utilizing both onboard and overhead sensor data are expected to yield significant improvements in obstacle avoidance in off road or complex urban conditions. DARPA and the U.S. Army will use the PerceptOR technologies and experimental data to make determinations regarding the practical utility of ground robots for FCS.

Scott Fish, DARPA's program manager for the PerceptOR program, commented, "PerceptOR will provide strong data for the rapid advance of perception system algorithms under real world conditions. The resulting prototype performance will also enable the Army to make clear robot application decisions based on the conditions of employment, and the level of human involvement in the robot navigation."

The PerceptOR program is taking a phased approach, allowing it to continually feed experimentally backed performance data to the FCS program. Today's awards are for an eight-month phase to develop and test the sensors, algorithms, mounting mechanisms and processors to be used in each team's prototype perception system. Two perception system prototypes will be outfitted aboard All-Terrain-Vehicles in preparation for testing in Phase II. Contractor teams will conduct experiments to evaluate the ability of their proposed components to perceive obstacles in foliage, at night, and through smoke, dust and precipitation.

Three of these teams will be selected to continue on into phase two, a 12-month period during which teams will conduct field testing with the full perception system prototypes under a variety of terrain and weather conditions. During the program's last phase, two teams will continue experiments for an additional 12 months in more challenging terrain and under degraded component conditions.

The following FCS-related announcements are available at http://www.darpa.mil/body/newre.html:

• Contractors for the Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle program were announced Feb. 7, 2001; and
  
• Contractor teams to develop the FCS design concept were announced May 9, 2000.