Scheduled for October 12-15 at Fort Benning, the Rodeo provides a venue for participants to present the latest in autonomous unmanned systems to the Army user and research and development communities. Utilizing an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the GTRI team will showcase the collaborative interoperability of separate, but interacting autonomous systems.

“Unmanned systems research is moving away from single vehicle operations to operations involving multiple vehicles with different types of payloads, sensors and levels of autonomy to execute a single mission,” said Lora Weiss, GTRI Lab Chief Scientist. “At GTRI, we had already started studying the collaboration between heterogeneous vehicles in a distributed way, where the vehicles sort out and plan the mission themselves. The Robotics Rodeo gives us an opportunity to demonstrate our research advances to the Army specifically, and to the community in general.”

Two events are scheduled for the Rodeo. The Extravaganza will be open to the public for participants to network with the public and other attendees. The Robotic Technology Observation, Demonstration and Discussion (RTOD2), which is closed to the public, will allow participants to demonstrate their technology to government and contractors. For RTOD2, GTRI will use off-the-shelf, readily available components coupled with additional sensors and autonomy logic for the unmanned airplanes. Researchers will repurpose the Sting autonomous vehicle used in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge to interact with the team of UAVs, as they operate and collaborate under autonomous control to complete the mission.

In the past few years, GTRI has begun bringing the various aspects of autonomous vehicle research under one umbrella to include all aspects of the systems—payloads, sensors, autonomy logic and collaborative operations. Research has also expanded the types of vehicles to include unmanned underwater and space vehicles. “GTRI has conducted research in the unmanned vehicle area  in many different ways,” said GTRI Research Scientist Charles Pippin. “Now we are exploring new ways to use interoperability and collaboration by looking at the mix of platforms as an overall system.”

Pippin and Weiss are part of the Unmanned and Autonomous Systems team at GTRI. The inaugural Robotics Rodeo was held last year in Fort Hood, Texas.