And that could open the door to an entire fleet of vehicle drones in the future, crisscrossing the nation's largest military installation while saving the Army millions of dollars.
An Army public-private initiative — Applied Robotics for Installations and Base Operations, or ARIBO — has begun testing the use of six-passenger, robot-driven golf carts outfitted with various automated sensors that would carry soldiers the roughly one-third mile from the Warrior Transition Battalion barracks to Womack Army Medical Center.
While the shuttles were announced last year, officials only began the first phase of testing at Fort Bragg earlier this year and have yet to make the system fully automatic for prolonged periods of time.
But last week, ARIBO engineers "flipped the switch" to give riders a sneak peek at the future of the program.
The literal switch is located near the steering wheel and is marked "Control Mode."
To the left, the switch is marked Human; to the right, Robot.
Last week, the ARIBO program manager — Edward Straub of U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, or TARDEC — and a civilian engineer, Joe Putney of Robotic Research LLC, took a Fayetteville Observer reporter on a test drive of the system.
"The robot is doing it all right now," Straub said as the shuttle navigated Fort Bragg's Warrior Transition Battalion campus.
The shuttle runs between the campus and Womack Army Medical Center, with stops at the Reilly Road and All American entrances, orthopedics and behavioral health.
That path crosses over a four-lane road that circles the hospital, 100th Infantry Division Loop, and the shuttle must navigate vehicle and pedestrian traffic.
As the shuttle approaches a group of three soldiers, it slows to a stop and allows them to pass before continuing on the route.
"We're sensing them right now," Putney said, motioning to a small map screen that shows the shuttle and surrounding objects, including people. "There's a laser system on board and basically what it's doing is it's scanning lasers across and measuring where they're located in the world and then generating basically a world model for which it makes decisions."
The system that controls the shuttle includes a mix of several technologies, including cameras, sensors, lasers, radar, lidar and GPS.
During the first phase of testing, engineers are not typically allowing the shuttle to autonomously operate.
Instead, Straub said the shuttle was operating like any other human-driven vehicle.
Meanwhile, the automated systems are "running in the background" while collecting data.
That will show engineers how human drivers and the robot drivers would have differed in certain situations and can allow them to adjust programing if needed.
Some time in January, Straub said engineers expect to begin phase two, in which the shuttle begins to operate autonomously with a safety operator behind the wheel to monitor the route.
Eventually, he said there will be no safety operator and the system will be fully autonomous.
The driverless shuttle program at Fort Bragg is the "flagship pilot" of the ARIBO program, Straub said.
The Army spends more than $400 million a year on its fleet of non-tactical vehicles, he said. Autonomous vehicles could help drastically cut those costs, with one shared autonomous vehicle replacing between four and six individually operated vehicles.
At Fort Bragg alone, a cost-benefit analysis shows that autonomous vehicles could save as much as $20 million over seven years.
But for now, the program is starting small, Straub said.
The shuttle between Womack and the Warrior Transition Battalion, which has about 200 injured, ill or wounded soldiers, will improve quality of life for the troops while saving money by reducing the number of missed appointments at the hospital.
"We look at the project as a win-win," Straub said.
The shuttle is an on-demand service, he said. That means potential users have to schedule rides through an Android phone application or kiosks at the Warrior Transition Battalion and Womack Army Medical Center.
ARIBO will expand its program next year, when it launches another project at Fort Leonard-Wood, Missouri. That program will involve autonomous electric mass transit, Straub said, with a platoon of self-driving buses shuttling 250 soldiers from barracks to dining facilities.
In addition to TARDEC and Robotic Research, the Army Research Lab and other partners are also involved in ARIBO.
And the Army is not limiting its research to non-tactical vehicles.
Officials have said that driverless technology could eventually help decrease accidents through features that include obstacle detection, collision avoidance, lane departure, tip-over warnings and vision enhancements for low-visibility conditions.
The vehicles may eventually be used to take food to soldiers in the field or ammunition to soldiers on a rifle range.
The Army has already demonstrated driverless capabilities in tactical scenarios.
In 2014, driverless convoys were tested at Fort Hood, Texas, and the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The latter convoy traveled completely unmanned at speeds exceeding 40 mph.
The technology also could eventually be used in more offensive vehicles, too, such as the Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Stryker.
©2016 The Fayetteville Observer (Fayetteville, N.C.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
