The goal is to develop autonomous ground vehicles that can navigate off-road terrain without any human input.
This newest phase involved letting the RHP loose on some legit US military training grounds in Texas.
The video showed off rugged, obstacle-filled environments packed with vegetation, waterways, ditches, and rocky outcrops.
Exactly the kind of hellish conditions that could give a self-driving system a full-on meltdown.
But DARPA’s 20-foot-long unmanned behemoth seemed to handle it all without breaking a sweat.
One peculiar feature that stood out in the video was the vehicle’s glowing green eyes.
Green = it’s on and in autonomy mode."
But those other vehicles are more like self-driving ATVs.
Meanwhile, this tank-scaled RHP takes autonomous capabilities to a whole new level of heavy-duty.
DARPA intends to keep iterating on RACER every 6 months or so, continually ramping up the autonomous tech.
The RHP is based on an existing Textron combat vehicle platform used by the Army.
An AI-driven tank definitely sounds terrifying.
But it might just offer a safer alternative to boots on the ground.
Of course, we’re still years away from anything like that becoming an actual deployable system.
Now, two decades later, it has an autonomous tank tearing across training grounds.
