Study Proposal:Transforming Terrestrial Agility At All Scales

The U.S. Army has a need for high levels of mobility on the ground, away from roads and other support infrastructure. The goal of this study will be to assess opportunities that could transform ground-based platforms in terms of both speed and agility, in scenarios ranging from teleoperation to fully autonomous execution. The goal is to assess these differences at a variety of scales, ranging from the millimeter scale all the way to tens of meters (roughly ranging from microbots to vehicles intended for large transport). Aspects of the study will include the role of interactions between terrain and platforms, sensing/perception, modeling, control, and platform morphology. The final product of this study will be a document containing recommendations for focused basic research. These recommendations will be based on both current literature and the current approaches used in practice, but their focus will be on open scientific questions that should be pursued in order to support next-generation fast, mobile systems in highly unstructured environments.