ARL will notify an awardee of delivery of any Controlled Unclassified Information, awardee deliverables are not expected to be considered Controlled Unclassified Information.

Yes, new connections between nodes can be proposed as long as functionality of current code and nodes remains.

Yes, we have the labeled data available for both of these tasks. Note that the quantity of data we have is more suitable for fine-tuning rather than complete training from scratch.

Ground vehicle behaviors: Navigate to a point, Navigate to any point in a region, Navigate within a bounded corridor, Simple servoing to follow a tracked object/person, Navigate to a point with a cost-map learned from examples, Exploration to maximize geometric map information in target region, reduce map entropy of occupancy grid.

Success of the SARA program is dependent on the establishment and maintenance of a collaborative research environment that encourages and facilitates the sharing of intellectual property while providing adequate protection of ownership rights. The United States Government (USG) shall obtain “Government Purpose Rights” to Intellectual Property developed in the course of performance under the Cooperative Agreement. “Government Purpose Rights” do not include commercial application and performers will be encourage to commercialize software developed. Proposals should address their intellectual property (IP) approach and how their approach will foster collaboration with ARL and other SARA Recipients, and how their solution will further advance the state-of-art of open source or government owned autonomy solutions. The SARA program has an emphasis on the transition of basic research to the military and other USG applications. Thus, the Participants will cooperate with ARL in transferring, or otherwise making available, rights to SARA Intellectual Property for USG purposes. Intellectual Property that is made or created by a Participant outside of the course of performing tasks under the Cooperative Agreement will be considered “Excluded Intellectual Property” and each Participant has the option to retain sole title and ownership to SARA Intellectual Property created solely by its employees. SARA Intellectual Property made or created jointly among Participants shall be jointly owned by such Participants.

In an experiment with intermittently-available GPS, then we will use GPS coordinates. In a GPS-denied experiment, goals will be specified relative to the initial pose of the robot at the beginning of the experiment.

At this point a multirotor platform is not planned to be provided as GFE to the awardee facilities and proposers should plan on having their own testbed for development. SARA developed GFE multirotor platforms will be available and used for integration and testing during the two-week experimental event in October. As the ARL testbed configuration will not be finalized until sub-topic #2 proposals are selected in order to ensure support of the proposed research, it is expected that the testbeds will not be built and ready for flight until some point into the program. At that point, depending on the number of awardees and the number of platforms available, some platforms may be provided as GFE to support preparation for the two-week experiment event.

The estimated funding of $3M is just for the first year seedling efforts. Option funding will be from FY21 funds, subject to negotiation and is outside of the $3M allocation for Cycle #1.

All the robotic platforms will use ROS and will have the capability to record bag files for trouble shooting, visualization of data, and creating data sets for off-line development. Therefore, audit trails or “Flight Data Recorder” like development is not requested in this sprint sub-topics #1 and #2. It may be relevant in sub-topic #3 as a component to a comprehensive overall system for managing, executing, and troubleshooting large-scale air-ground collaborative experiments.

For Sub-Topic 3 we are looking algorithms and software to manage and control large robotic field experiments in both urban and forested environments. Per the FOA this also requires management of execution code, runtime monitoring, configuration management and version-control, and validation of emergency stop functionality and other safety measures. There is no simulation, hardware, or test-bed development as part of sub-topic #3. ARL is developing the simulation environment internally and outside of the SARA program. Any experimentation will only be to demonstrate functionality of the developed software. For an initial capability demonstration we will have two ground and two air assets working in collaboration as part of an ARL experiment during the April and October events that can be used for this purposes. All SARA sprint #1 experimentation will be on single platforms and could also be used. Future SARA sprints and experiments may have tens of both air and ground assets operating at same time over large areas.

No preference, it is dependent of technologies being proposed and proposer preference. If there are synergies between component technologies or they all fall within one Sub-Topic area then a single proposal is most likely best, if no synergies or connections between component technologies and they span multiple Sub-topic areas then separate proposals could be considered.

No preference. Proposals can be from single or multiple institutions, but an award will be to a single entity so if multiple institutions are involved in a proposal, the subawardee relationship should be defined.

For this sprint we are only interested in increasing the autonomy of the platforms. The only human interaction would be through the ground stations, the number of interactions with the system to complete the missions will be monitored. Future sprints may consider more human-agent interaction tasks.

Most testing will be simple point A to point B navigation tasks. There may be some area coverage tasks at point B.

That topic would be considered. While physical platform development is not a focus, any autonomy solutions that can increase resiliency of platforms in complex off-road outdoor environments where increased operational tempo may result in collisions would be considered.

Awardees will be encouraged to work together but not required. Solutions will coordinated to run on ARL platforms during the two week experimental events and will require collaboration with ARL staff and some level of collaboration between all participants.

SARA awardees will work very closely with ARL personnel. The two-week experiment events will be coordinated to align to planned ARL experimentation. SARA awardees will be running solutions on ARL platforms in collaboration with ARL staff and ARL developed solutions.

Not for this sprint. Multi-agent topics may be a focus of future sprint topics. Options should focus on extensions for current sub-topics and proposed research.

For this sprint we will not be looking at inter-agent communications and radio solutions to support that can be included but not required.

Yes, both air and ground platforms can navigate without GPS. Experiments will also look at intermittent GPS operation. In some cases no map will be given, some cases a 2-D bird’s eye view with stale obstacle information may be provided. A full 3-D map with detailed coordinates of obstacles will not be provided.

There is no specific desire to go to 500g or less platforms for this sprint. It is not expected that the SARA UAV test beds will be at that scale in order to support necessary sensor and processing needs but if desired capabilities can be achieved by proposed work it will be considered.

We will be looking to test in all conditions so both day and night.

Option funding would come from FY21 funds, subject to negotiation and is outside of the $3M allocation for Cycle #1.

ROS, future sprints may utilize ROS2 but all current solutions will be ROS based.

Ground autonomy stack is on C++ and python.

Yes, proposers should indicate any additional sensors or sensor manipulation needed to support proposed research.

Yes. The intent is for experimental control software that can scale up in numbers of platforms. We are interested in controlling heterogeneous mixes of platforms to include both air and ground based systems. We do not expect to experiment with or control very large high value assets as part of SARA beyond the types of systems called out in the FOA.

No, future sprints may address this but not for sprint #1. Sprint #1 is focused on single platform autonomy.

The actual date is still TBD but will be after the October experimental event.

No. We may consider legged mobility in future sprints but not for sprint #1.

Yes, the intent is that code will be added to the ARL software repository. An applicant may submit a proposal for IP protected solutions or solutions that do not provide source code, but applicants are reminded to review the evaluation factors as the applicant’s plan for source code will be evaluated as part of their collaboration plan.

Yes, will be posted to the SARA website.

There is no specific number of proposals the Government anticipates funding. The number of awards will be based on the quality of proposals received, the cost of those proposals commensurate with the level of effort, and the Government funding allotted for this program.

Yes

Per the FOA, we are looking for software solutions to run, control, and manage field experiments with heterogeneous mixes of air and ground platforms that can scale up to large numbers of platforms.

Option funding will be from FY21 funds, subject to negotiation and is outside of the $3M allocation for Cycle #1.

We will be posting the slides from the webinar later today to this site, questions and answers raised during the webinar were recently posted.

GPS will be scaled during experiments from full GPS availability to no GPS availability and in some cases be dependent of actual tree coverage and actual GPS signal connectivity. Final GPS coordinates will be given for goal locations.