Robotics CTA: 10 Years of Integration, Assessment, and Lessons Learned

Abstract

Over the past decade, robotics technologies and the tools used to develop them have undergone significant advancement and transformation. In this paper, we observe and assess these changes from the perspective of a 10-year research program sponsored by the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, named the Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance. Beyond advancing the state of the art by conducting research at some of the top academic institutions across the United States, the alliance also worked with top government and industry partners to integrate the research into meaningful experiments and demonstrations with military relevance. This paper assesses and provides insight into the effectiveness of the collaboration tools used by the team, management methods, data collection efforts, and live and virtual experiments. Ultimately, we seek to inform future efforts requiring disparate and distant teams of the potential advantages and challenges of using such tools by providing our lessons learned for how most effectively to work as a team of teams for advancing robotics.