Editorial: Special Issue on Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance (RCTA) Program

The growing technology investment in driverless cars, warehouse automation, human-service robots, and artificial intelligence applications in our daily lives is inspiring. However, the majority of this effort assumes a structured environment, which leaves significant, unsolved problems for autonomous robots operating in unstructured environments. Beginning in 2010, the U.S. Combat Capabilities Development Command, Army Research Laboratory (ARL), funded a 10-year research program, the Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance (RCTA), which brought together scientists and engineers from government, academia, and industry to develop autonomous mobile robot technologies focused on solving the unique research challenges of operating in unstructured environments. While the underlying motivation came from helping soldiers operating in Army-relevant environments, the benefits extend to scenarios ranging from disasters, to planetary exploration, to reducing reliance on extensive prior knowledge in structured environments.