Research into Intelligent Autonomy of Small Robots

The Army Research Laboratory Research Associateship Program (ARL-RAP) offers a research opportunity focused on developing computational methods that enable robots to perceive and understand their environment; move, see, orient and collaborate in complex missions with limited human intervention. As the focus is on robots that can be applied to the Army domain, of particular interest are highly efficient, robust, and agile methods that exhibit excellent properties with limited computational power, storage, and bandwidth. Research opportunities exist in areas including robotic autonomy in mixed-initiative operations, collaboration of small robots in communications-limited environments, autonomous navigation at operational tempo, detection and tracking of moving objects, multi-robot object tracking and classification, GPS-denied localization, reasoning over semantic concepts, fusion of information from heterogeneous sensors, optimization of complex algorithms for computationally limited platforms, and experimentation and validation methods in robotics. The program is designed to significantly increase the involvement of creative and highly trained scientists and engineers from academia and industry in scientific and technical areas of interest and relevance to the Army.