Digitally Engineering the Future of Army Off-Road Autonomous Vehicles

Woodrow Bellamy

Inside the University-of-Michigan-led Automotive Research Center (ARC), researchers and students work on the next generation of military vehicles. Here, the team works on an autonomous vehicle that will be fully immersed in a digital environment for experimentation. Simulation allows the U.S. Army to save time and money versus traditional physical experimentation. (Image: Levi Hutmacher/University of Michigan)

The University of Michigan’s Automotive Research Center (ARC) has served as a source of cutting-edge modeling and simulation for the U.S. Army’s fleet of ground vehicles — the largest such fleet in the world — since 1994. In January, the Army signed a new five-year, $100 million agreement with ARC to advance modeling, simulation, and the use of new digital engineering tools to develop future off-road autonomous vehicles.

Bogdan Epureanu, ARC Director and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is the guest on this episode of the Aerospace & Defense Technology podcast to discuss how his team is working on high-fidelity synthetic environments, virtual vehicle prototypes, and virtual reality tools for human-autonomy teaming — all in the pursuit of enabling future off-road autonomous vehicles for the U.S. Army.

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