ROBOTIC RESEARCH OPCO, LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: A20-095

Description

With the success of Army programs including Autonomous Ground Resupply, Robotic Combat Vehicle, Autonomous Ground Resupply, and Combat Vehicle Robotics, the next stage of autonomous vehicles in the military will be for tactical and combat ready platforms. Though most Lidar companies are targeting automotive grade sensors that will meet water and dust sealing requirements, as well as the thermal requirements, there are still numerous military environments in which these sensors will fail. A Lidar system failure in a combat ready fully autonomous military vehicle could pose a severe risk to soldiers. Therefore, more robust sensors must be designed to withstand these environmental effects to ensure reliable operation in combat military applications, improving crew survivability and mission success. To achieve this, Robotic Research proposes the development of a Lidar Ruggedization Solution (LRS) capable of surviving front line military conditions. Providing a reliable high-resolution Lidar that is hardened to withstand military environments will require comprehensive analysis, design, and testing. Ensuring that the system is also affordable requires more than designing for manufacturability, but the cooperation of commercial Lidar system manufacturers currently equipped to manufacture the proposed hardened system. To that end, Robotic Research has received letters of support from two well established US-based companies who have great interest in this technology. Through working with Lidar companies as the prime contractor on two of the previous mentioned Army programs, Expedited Leader Follower and Autonomous Ground Resupply, several Lidar companies under NDA with Robotic Research have shared product road maps with plans to make their sensors available at more reasonable costs within the next year. Furthermore, many of these Lidar companies are presently working to further ruggedize their sensors, but their target requirements fall short of combat vehicle requirements, reinforcing the need for a military-specific hardening effort. Robotic Research will develop the LRS in cooperation with these Lidar companies and will support the commercialization of the LRS with these Lidar companies for future phase II and/or phase III efforts of this project. While developing the autonomous capabilities on the Expedited Leader Follower and Autonomous Ground Resupply programs, Robotic Research also completed an in-depth analysis of commercial off-the-shelf Lidar systems that were failing to meet advertised ingress protection standards. Once the point of failure was identified, future Lidar systems on these programs have been modified to meet stricter ingress standards and ensure the reliability of the program.