New Project with First Transit, US Ignite at Ft. Carson

Perrone Robotics, in partnership with First Transit and US Ignite announced that we are working with the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) to deploy a TONY Shuttle on Ft. Carson’s Smart Transportation Testbed. This project will require 2 TONY GEM vehicles that are powered by Perrone Robotic’s autonomous stack.

This is a year-long project where the collaboration partners will evaluate the utility of an autonomous vehicle to help transport staff around the base to key sites needed as part of their deployment there. The initial target for this work is new recruits to the Army who arrive on base typically without a personal vehicle, but who have the need to travel from their barracks to the Exchange (general shopping), the Commissary (groceries), and the health club which makes over a 3 mile round trip.

An initial loop around the base has been established and it is a very robust and challenging route with 15 intersections and 45 crosswalks to traverse. There are many yield turns where the TONY vehicle has to turn across traffic and thus detect and yield to oncoming vehicles. The PRI team set up the course in about 1 day and spent the next several days refining and tuning turns and stops to improve the smooth ride as well as testing out the interactions with live traffic. As with all of our projects, the core TONY vehicle is a street-legal vehicle and we have a safety operator at the controls who can take over operation of the vehicle at any time for convenience to stop in alternate locations, courtesy to give crossing pedestrians a clear signal that we’ll stop well ahead of time, or if they feel the autonomous vehicle isn’t clearly seeing oncoming traffic and the operator wants to be perfectly clear.

More information about the project is available from the US Ignite website - and we’ll keep updating our story here.