The Texas A&M Rellis StarLab Facility proposes to develop and demonstrate a distributed Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality infrastructure to support the development, testing and evaluation of autonomous vehicle platforms, algorithms and operational scenarios using both Ground and Aerial vehicles. This infrastructure will allow operation and testing in real (outdoor) and simulated (indoor) environments using multi-agents and humans in the loop. A unique feature of the DARES Infrastructure is its capability to merge AR/VR scenarios with real time platform operational data. In addition, DARES will have the ability to link to other facilities, in real time at remote locations, in order to exploit shared resources and data hence the distributed nature of the proposed infrastructure.

Unmanned Ground platforms on the ground work with soldiers to provide enhanced situational awareness to human teammates in order to create better tactical options for leaders. For the warfighters to make effective decisions, a complete view of the situational awareness obtained by fusing information from disparate sensors is needed. This requires combining data from various sensors, vehicles as well as transmitting this completed information to the base (i.e., remote situational awareness) as well as being able to give commands to the vehicles and tele-operate these vehicles when needed.