For over a decade, ETC has supported  the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) with building and maintaining partnerships to grow ARL’s capabilities across the enterprise and to facilitate technology transfer and transition. ETC brought technologies from industry, academia, and other government agencies to ARL for consideration and promoted ARL intellectual property, patents, and capabilities to potential partners. In 2021, ETC focused its efforts on the newly opened Robotics Research Collaboration Campus (R2C2), a facility designed for experimenting with drones and autonomous ground vehicles. ETC helped ARL develop the infrastructure for partnerships with external industry, academic, and government partners.

First, ETC worked with R2C2 leaders to develop a program and business plan for the facility, creating a reimbursable business model capable of providing comprehensive experimentation support and facilities to partners. Next, ETC helped increase awareness and visibility of R2C2 and ARL’s robotics and autonomous research capability to potential industry, academic, and government partners. This included conducting market research on potential partners, developing outreach tools customized for specific target audiences, implementing outreach campaigns, and evaluating outreach efforts.

ETC conducted a major Remote Autonomous Systems Technology Assessment (Tech Assess ’23) to connect emerging companies with ARL’s robotics and autonomy capabilities and augment current research. ETC promoted the opportunity and received a record number of white papers (93), and in collaboration with government SMEs, down selected to 20 companies. ETC’s work resulted in a 20-fold increase in technology submissions over prior years’ efforts and a 100% deliverable acceptance.

Over the past five years, ETC built substantial STEM outreach programs focused on robotics and autonomy, cyber, and energy sciences. These programs are funded by competitive grants from the National Defense Education Program and the Army Educational Outreach Program and serve thousands of students and teachers across the country.

Additionally, ETC developed Collaboration Management Tools for R2C2 comprising a suite of apps. The apps provide for efficient collection of visitor, attendee, event, and experiment, tour, or event information.

ETC’s technical expertise also informed the planning, application and implementation of Distributed Experimental Capability and Data Management for ARL. This task focuses on improving the efficacy of partner access to ARL data sets, synthetic data, and various R2C2 networks as well as developing both access to and ease of use of HPC assets at the ARL DSRC.

ETC also helped enable Live, Virtual, Constructive (LVC) research in multi-domain operations to include the infusion of autonomous systems, multi-agent teaming, and experimentation. ETC’s role in this effort was to connect a wide range of ARL, commercial, academic, and other non-ARL government networks, and architecting and implementing solutions to enable data flows and manage and validate information within the system.