The Robotics Technology Consortium Inc. (RTC) Friday announced the government awarded nine winners of its second round of projects totaling $3.62 million.
“Winners in this second round of funding include universities, research labs, and companies,” said Ellen Purdy, enterprise director, OSD/Joint Ground Robotics. “It is great to see the entire community working together to advance the field and get technology into the hands of our warfighters.”
The teams will do research to further develop innovative technologies that add capabilities to the currently deployed unmanned ground vehicle and enable future unmanned ground systems.
“It took only 107 days from the request for project proposals posting on our web pages to having the entire set of winners under contract,” said Helen Greiner, the elected president of the RTC, “and we are very proud of our ability to support small research efforts rapidly and cost-effectively.”
The winning team leads and projects are:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)–“Autonomous Stair Climbing for Portable Unmanned Ground Vehicles.”
The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill–“Fast 3D Reconstruction and Visualization for Explosive Ordnance Disposal for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (EOD for UGVs).”
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)–“Rapid 3D Object Visualization for Mobile Robots.”
Photon-X–“Miniature 3D Spatial Phase Sensors.”
Vecna Corp.–“Automated Tool Change.”
AnthoTronix Inc.–“Instrumented Glove-Based System (iGlove-3) for Controlling High-DOF Manipulators.”
General Dynamics [GD] Robotic Systems–“Untitled Proposal.”
TORC Technologies–“Autonomous Remote Control HMMWV (ARCH)” iRobot Corporation–“Autonomous: Supervisory Control with Enhanced Situational Awareness.”
In May 2008, the RTC entered into a $170 million Other Transactions Agreement (OTA) with the Defense Department to better enable non-traditional defense contractors to undertake technical projects on behalf of the government.
Since then, the government has awarded a total of 16 projects, worth $8.37 million involving 35 member companies, universities, and non-profit organizations.
Membership in the RTC is open to U.S.-based companies, non-profits, and universities.