ONR 30 autonomous ground system program overview

In 2010 the ONR Code 30 Irregular and Expeditionary Warfare Department began a long-term strategic investment in ground system autonomy focused on supporting our Expeditionary forces, namely the United States Marine Corps (USMC). The Marine Corps' mission and challenges are unique and as such require unique capabilities of the autonomous systems they will employ. For the past six years ONR Code 30 has been executing the Multi-role Autonomous Ground Vehicle (MAGV) program which has focused on developing core technologies to enable the operation of autonomous ground vehicles in expeditionary environments. The key overarching tenets of the program have been to develop a ground autonomy system that is affordable, can operate in those expeditionary (off-route) environments, and which will be the technological foundation for future DoD programs both in S and T and acquisition. Those three key tenets have driven many of the investment decisions of the program including a focus on low-cost sensors and computation (e.g., vision systems), congested environment motion planning, operation under degraded GPS conditions, multi-vehicle coordination, and using a rapid development and evolutionary systems engineering approach with rigorous and consistent performance evaluations. This paper describes the goals and objectives of the ONR 30 ground autonomy program and provides an overview of the technical accomplishments that have been achieved over the past six years.