Defense Advanced Research Project Agency-TTO — Perception for Off Road Robots (PerceptOR) Communications Engineering

Project Overview: The PerceptOR program supported technology to advance outdoor obstacle detection for robotic systems and to enable higher levels of autonomous mobility needed for FCS operations. Experimentally backed performance data enabled the U.S. Army to better understand how to design and deploy field robots, as well as the level of human involvement required for robot navigation.

• CenGen provided network engineering expertise and program management support for the design, integration and installation support for a network communications system in support of PerceptOR technology field based experimentation and demonstrations of capabilities as it relates to robotic (automated vehicle) mobility.
• CenGen ensured communications solutions were compatible with emerging standards and anticipated FCS/Army communications systems.
• CenGen designed, configured and updated a network with size and weight requirements to address the need for maximum bandwidth or throughput availability and to minimize the impact on applications such that applications did not have to be tuned for a particular network and for network communication stability.
• CenGen tested network monitor and control tools to collect, log, and monitor in real-time the amount of network traffic and related network data between the command center and the vehicle(s).
• CenGen provided controlled and repeatable degraded communication scenarios to allow the contractor team to be subjected to the same degraded communication for better testing of systems.