WARREN, Mich.—U.S. Army Ground Vehicle Systems Center has released an open source robotic data recording tool known as Data DirectoR, or DDR for short.

The tool, built on top of the ROS middleware framework, is available to the entire Robotic Operating System (ROS) community via the ROS-Military Registry at https://rosmilitary.org

ROS-M is a software ecosystem for military robotic and autonomous systems (RAS) based on the open source ROS. ROS-M provides a trusted community of government and industry software developers with the means to collectively amass, maintain, and utilize a federated body of reusable, ROS-compatible, software packages and modules suitable for military applications.

“Data DirectoR standardizes data collection and expands the amount of data collected while managing resource consumption, paving the way towards standardized analysis,” said Kevin Mills, GVSC associate director for Robotics. “This ensures that data between organizations and industry vendors remains comparable. Many of DDR’s features are also focused on increasing data collection reliability, especially in harsh field-testing conditions.”

Mills said improving data collection and analysis quality is critical to enabling data driven decisions, which are a core component to making strategic investments in future ground vehicle platforms. These include the Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) Light, Medium, and Heavy variants, which use DDR to capture critical autonomy performance data during test events and Soldier experiments.

“Using DDR to collect this data allows developers to quickly diagnose any issues experienced, evaluate technical performance, and provide data for future autonomy software development,” Mills said.

In addition, DDR is the government-mandated data collection tool for GVSC’s Combat Vehicle Robotics (CoVeR) program. Mills said the CoVeR program is responsible for developing and integrating cutting edge technology to address capability gaps on robotic and autonomous combat platforms.

“Over the past several weeks, all vendors participating in our annual CoVeR Engineering Evaluation Test (EET) at Camp Grayling, Michigan, are required to integrate DDR with their software solution.”