Army re-ups General Dynamics 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.

General Dynamics of Falls Church, Va., will continue supporting development of perception technologies that enable robots to see and understand the environment.

The company also will work on intelligent control architectures that enable autonomous planning and execution in tactical environments, and human-machine interfaces to use robots to minimize 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 autonomous systems that will provide warfighters 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.

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