AMAS Shows Self-Driving Smarts in Army Demonstration

   
       
           
       
       
           
       
   

A self-driving Army truck negotiates obstacles in a January demonstration of the Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System. Photo courtesy Lockheed Martin.

By Brett Davis



Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center have shown that fully autonomous, self-driving convoys made up of different types of vehicles can operate in urban environments.



The team conducted a demonstration earlier this month at Fort Hood, Texas, to wrap up the capabilities advancement demonstration of the Autonomous Mobility Applique System program, a joint effort of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps.



In the demonstration, vehicles had to avoid obstacles, including oncoming traffic, stalled vehicles and pedestrians, and negotiate intersections and traffic circles set in mock urban and rural areas.



AMAS is a kit, including a lidar sensor and GPS receivers, that can be fitted onto nearly any military vehicle to convert it to a self-driving system. For the demonstration, the kit was fitted to Army M915 trucks and the Palletized Loading System vehicle.



While the main thrust of AMAS is to make convoy work safer for soldiers by having some vehicles drive themselves, in the AMAS CAD exercise the humans were removed from the convoy altogether.



“The AMAS CAD hardware and software performed exactly as designed and dealt successfully with all of the real-world obstacles that a real-world convoy would encounter,” says David Simon, AMAS program manager for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control.



The company split the cost of the AMAS demonstration with the Army Capabilities Integration Center.