Urban Ops Hopper
The Urban Ops Hopper program will develop a semi-autonomous hybrid hopping/articulated wheeled robotic platform that could adapt to the urban environment in real-time and provide the delivery of small payloads to any point of the urban jungle while remaining lightweight, small to minimize the burden on the soldier. In general, small robots or unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) are severely limited by obstacle negotiation capability. The demonstrated hopping capability allows small UGVs to overcome obstacles many times their own size. Hopping mobility can be shown to be much more efficient than hovering for obstacles at heights less than or equal to a few meters. The proposed hopping robot would be truly multi-functional in that it will negotiate all aspects of the urban battlefield to deliver payloads to non-line-of-sight areas with precision.
