Area of Interest (AoI) Statement: Ground Vehicle Autonomy Pathways

Problem

The Department of Defense (DoD) seeks commercial solutions to advance autonomous vehicle operations for U.S. Army ground robotics, such as the Robotic Combat Vehicle-Light.

The government is seeking vendors to evaluate current software in support of unmanned operations, and augment/enhance the software stack based upon government feedback. The resultant prototype will provide software in support of unmanned operations that fuses multiple sensors and also allows for teleoperation of the unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) in the diverse and challenging environments inherent to military operations. The software suite will also provide a technical pipeline to continue rapid development and deployment of autonomous features as they become available by industry. Surrogate hardware will be made available to vendors selected for this effort to support prototyping, when and if required by the government, however, vendors may provide their own vehicles for testing and demonstration purposes. The software should be built upon an open architecture design framework with an emphasis on use of industry standards for physical and logical interfaces and protocols, including safety architecture, as well as portability into future systems that may or may not have the same hardware.

Solutions will provide strategies and plans for data collection and management in both physical and simulated environments. Vendors will use open standards for data ingest, storage, and exchange, as well as for the training, deployment, and transfer of the software system. Solutions will also provide simulated testing environments and an overall plan to take the system from simulated to physical, real world environments.

The government understands that companies will likely not be able to meet all of the specifications in this solicitation, but encourage companies with demonstrable capability applicable to one or more of these specifications to apply. Preference will be given to vendors, or teams of vendors, that show a capability for generating an end-to-end solution. Vendors who propose solutions using a teaming and/or prime subcontractor arrangement, which combine multiple solutions into one, are highly encouraged to submit such solutions individually, as well as together.

Company proposals must achieve or include the following:

Company and development team must be U.S.-owned/based.
Include demonstrations and/or descriptions of previous experience with similar unmanned vehicle projects.
Demonstrate the ability to develop either end-to-end modular autonomy or individual autonomy modules (either classical or modern) and iterate with user feedback.
Demonstrate an ability to transition to production and sustainment of algorithms.
Demonstrate a mature software development process, with experience integrating into existing infrastructure.

article | 7 Mar 2022

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