The RACER Heavy Platform (RHP) vehicles are enormous, weighing in at 12 tons and measuring 20 feet (6,09 meters) long. The vehicles are programmed using the Textron M5 base system, already used in many driverless vehicles by the U.S. Army, and are meant to complement the RACER Fleet Vehicles (RFVs) which are comparatively small at just 2 tons and 11 feet (3,35 meters) long.
The vehicle tests, aided by teams from the University of Washington and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, happened at military training sites in Texas back in late 2023, but are just being announced by DARPA now.
Videos from the Texas tests are now available on YouTube, demonstrating the fully autonomous driving of these gigantic vehicles in off-road conditions. One interesting feature of the robot is its mysterious green lights in the front that resemble eyes.
What's their purpose? A spokesperson for DARPA told Gizmodo in an email, “....it’s just an indicator light to show the status of the vehicle. Green = it’s on and in autonomy mode.”
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has been working on autonomous vehicles for decades, starting in earnest in 1983 with the Strategic Computing Initiative. And it's incredible how far the U.S. military has come. In testing, the 1985 Autonomous Land Vehicle was confused by just a little snow on the road. But that kind of obstacle is clearly not an issue here in the 2020s.
“Having two radically different types of vehicles helps us advance towards RACER’s goal of platform agnostic autonomy in complex, mission-relevant off-road environments that are significantly more unpredictable than on-road conditions,” Stuart Young, RACER program manager, said on Wednesday.
