 The U.S. Army is advancing robotics technology with the goal of creating teammates for future American soldiers. At a Pittsburgh event October 17th, at the National Robotics Engineering Center, the Army and its academic and industry partners showcased the technology they've been developing for the past 10 years. The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory led the effort. 10 years ago, February 2009, the Army Research Laboratory issued a program announcement with the goal of bringing together industrial, government and academic institutions to address research and development required to enable the development and deployment of future military unmanned ground vehicle systems ranging in size from manned portables to ground combat vehicles. This is what started the Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance. Today we celebrate the culmination of 10 years of hard work by of course numerous universities and industry partners who have come together under this collaborative technology alliance to work with government scientists side by side, particularly researchers at the Army Research Laboratory. The capstone event showcased the foundational research the alliance has been working on to meet Army modernization goals, as well as the research behind autonomy for the next generation combat vehicle. We've really changed the way we think about robotics over the last 10 years from thinking about robots using a metric world where there are tools that they don't really understand the world. They don't really have the ability to reason about the world. And we've really started bringing in semantic understanding of the world, which basically means they understand concepts in the same way humans do. If you don't understand the world in those terms then it's hard to understand and imagine or predict what the systems will do. Partners included General Dynamics Land Systems Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University, the Robotics Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Florida State University, University of Central Florida, University of Pennsylvania, Kinetic North America, and Caltech Jet Propulsion Lab. What we see now is an emerging group of young leaders who are working across the autonomy enterprise to move these objectives forward to have impact for the Army. So really my pride is probably beyond words today. And I'm so proud of the fact that this group was able to come together and bring the community of folks together that have worked on this problem for over a decade and to be able to show that off. With this milestone complete, the Army has its new goals in mind. I know we have a long way to go before robotic technology is as commonplace as say the automobile and devices powered by speech recognition are as intuitive as human beings. But thanks to the professionalism and dedication of all who have worked for and with the Robotics CTA over the past decade or more, we have taken a significantly forward to providing unprecedented capabilities for the soldier in our Army.