A practical application of decentralized UGV teaming: Autonomous Convoy Parking

This paper presents Neya’s efforts in developing autonomous depot assembly and parking behaviors for the Ground Vehicle Systems Center’s (GVSC) Autonomous Ground Re-supply (AGR) program. Convoys are a prime target for the enemy, and therefore GVSC is making efforts to remove the human operators and make them autonomous. However, humans still have to manually drive multiple convoy vehicles to and from their depot parking locations before and after autonomous convoy operations – a time-consuming and laborious process. Neya systems was responsible for the design, development, and testing of the autonomous depot assembly and disassembly behaviors, enabling end-to-end autonomy for convoy operations. Our solution to the problem, including the concept of operations, design, as well as approaches towards testing and validation are described in detail.