Showcase

Ground

Self-driving at 1/8 scale, since 2011.

Autonomous ground swarms. Our off-road robot vehicles take their missions from the cloud and run them from a field base station, on the same autonomy stack as our scout boat.

Three matte black autonomous off-road robot buggies in formation on sand beside an open hard case holding a base-station laptop, at golden hour.
1/8-scale off-road robot vehicles, each with its own computer, GPS and sonar, working as one swarm.

By arrangement

Ground swarm

Autonomous ground vehicles

Every vehicle runs its own loop for low-level control and self-preservation, while the base station tasks the swarm as a whole and the cloud authorises and watches each mission.

Capability · swarm GPS missions, tasked from the cloud and run from a field base station
Platform · off-road robot vehicles with onboard GPS, IMU and sonar
Resilience · return-to-base on link loss
Behaviour · self-forming boundaries and even spacing
Shared stack · the same autonomy and base-station tech as SCOUT-01

What the swarm does

Tasked from the cloud, run in the field

Area setup

A mission created and authorised in the cloud reaches the base station, which sends each vehicle to its own GPS point and reports back once the area is set, such as a landing zone for aircraft.

Return to base

Vehicles drive out to their GPS destinations and come home to the base marker on command. A vehicle that loses its link heads back to base on its own.

Emergent order

They form boundaries and beacons and space themselves evenly as they move, settling into a grid that covers the area efficiently. On a landing zone, the vehicles mark its edges and serve as its beacons.

Next: the scout boat Back to showcases

Heritage: autonomous ground-swarm work presented at FCRAR, the Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics, 2011 and 2012.