Meet Next-Gen Urban Warfare Robot

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Urban warfare requires that soldiers as well as unmanned systems have specific capabilities. The US Department of Defense has been advancing an initiative to enhance robots’ ability to self-sufficiently travel through urban military environments.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has partnered with Dr. Kiju Lee at Texas A&M University to create mobile robots for military applications that can determine, with or without human intervention, whether wheels or legs are more suitable to travel across terrains. 

The DARPA OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program awarded the research team a project for the development of unmanned ground vehicles with agile and versatile locomotive capabilities for urban military operations. 

According to nanowerk.com, Lee and her team are developing an adaptable Wheel-and-Leg Transformable Robot (α-WaLTR) that can traverse over varying surfaces, including staircases, more efficiently. The model will move with wheels or legs depending on their immediate need and will be able to decide for itself which to use. 

“Legged locomotion is more versatile, but suffers from inherent structural, mechanical and control complexities,” Lee said. “The proposed testbed will be equipped with novel wheel/leg transformable mechanisms, which can switch between the two locomotion modes actively adapting to its environment, but without needing any additional actuator.”

Although created for military use, the team hopes this technology will transcend this field and be applied to many other areas, such as space, domestic service, surveillance and agriculture.