Army re-ups General Dynamic for robotics work

General Dynamics Corp. won a three-year, $28 million contract extension to continue its work with the Army Research Laboratory's Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance.

Under the contract, General Dynamics of Falls Church, Va., will continue supporting the development of perception technologies enabling robots to see and understand the environment. The company also will work on intelligent control architectures allowing autonomous planning and execution in tactical environments and human-machine interfaces capable of tasking robots while minimizing operator workload.

The contract, which continues General Dynamics' role as the lead for a robotics-focused consortium, will run through 2009.

Initiated in 2001, the robotics alliance is a consortium of academic, industrial and government partners focusing robotics research on the autonomous systems that will provide soldiers with new tactical capabilities.

General Dynamics' initial funding for the alliance was $42 million for robotics research, with an additional time and materials agreement capped at $60 million for transitioning research products.

Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance partners include Applied Systems Intelligence Inc., BAE Systems North America Inc., Carnegie Mellon University, Florida A&M University, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Micro Analysis and Design Inc., Sarnoff Corp., SRI International Inc., and the University of Maryland.

The RCTA associate members are Howard University, North Carolina A&T State University, PercepTek Inc. and Signal Systems Corp.

The company has more than 70,800 employees and annual sales of $19.2 billion. General Dynamics ranks No. 5 on Washington Technology's 2005 Top 100 list, which measures federal contracting revenue.

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