Establishment of a Center for Defense Robotics

A document presents an overview of the recently established Joint Center for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (JC-UGV), located at the Army's Detroit Arsenal in Warren, Michigan. The JC-UGV is intended to become the central facility for managing all phases of the life cycles of military robotic ground vehicles: from concept; through research and development, acquisition, and sustainment; to the end of life. The JC-UGV is also intended to facilitate the move of the Robotic Systems Joint Program Office (RS-JPO) from Huntsville, Alabama to the Detroit Arsenal as part of a consolidation of military development and acquisition of all ground vehicles. An important part of the mission of the JC-UGV is to provide a system- integration laboratory that will include both robotic hardware and a distributed computational-simulation environment that will enable researchers and developers in the RS-JPO, industry, and academia to collaborate to solve complex problems. In addition to describing the aforementioned developments in detail, the document describes the organizational structure of the JC-UGV, discusses the role of the JC-UGV as one of several military organizations oriented toward lifecycle management, and summarizes JC-UGV university outreach, industry outreach, and pilot programs.