Racing on the Edge - Episode 87

RACER enables off-road vehicles to travel autonomously and reliably at high speeds over cross-country terrain, enabling new capabilities for our warfighters. 

Since the DARPA Grand Challenge kicked off more than 20 years ago, the Department of Defense has been very publicly invested in creating the capabilities necessary for ground vehicles to travel autonomously in areas without roads, signs, maps, or even GPS signals. 

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Stuart Young, who leads the Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program, which is creating platform agnostic autonomy capable of operating in complex, mission-relevant, off-road environments that are significantly more unpredictable than on-road conditions. 

We also speak with Dr. Trent Mills, a Colonel in the U.S. Army and special assistant to the DARPA director. Mills shares a warfighter perspective on what the Army has learned from RACER, and how autonomy is being integrated into the way the Army prepares and thinks about future engagements.  

Check out videos from earlier experiments to better envision what testing looks like in the field: 

• RACER Experiment 4 – Heavy Platform Highlight Video 
• RACER Experiment 4 – Cockpit view of an autonomous off-road run in TX 
• RACER Experiment 3 – Highlight video 

In the interview, Young shares: 

• The importance of real-world experimentation and testing 
• How the RACER program has evolved over its time  
• How performers on RACER have spun out innovative companies to accelerate bringing new capabilities to the warfighter 
• The confluence of technologies that have made off-road autonomy viable 
• What edge case scenarios RACER is still exploring and trying to solve, and what success means for the program