 The slippery-wintry mix that covered much of the northeast corridor of Maryland in late February is no match for a couple of Army ATVs, and apparently it can't stop an autonomous ground vehicle from mapping and navigating a path on its first time in the snow. Soldiers and scientists from the U.S. Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory spent a half day at the ARL Robotics Research Collaboration Campus, serving ground robotic vehicles to navigate unstructured terrain completely on their own. So I've been Team Ignite. Really excited to be here. I've never been here. These ARL soldiers support Team Ignite, a collaborative effort that puts scientists, engineers, university researchers, concept experts and weapons requirements writers together to explore innovative research, emerging technologies, and maneuver formation. It's important so they see what's going on and what capabilities might be coming down the road as well as additional threats that they might be facing in the future. Also, it's important for the soldiers to provide their feedback and their understanding of military operations to help with research in these areas. The ARL Robotics Research Collaboration Campus, located just outside of Baltimore, is an Army facility for advancing knowledge of autonomous and intelligent systems. This location is uniquely dedicated to Army Robotics Research. Its reconfigurable infrastructure supports scalable, multi-domain, battlefield operations accessible to the extended research community. We've got capabilities coming together between autonomy, artificial intelligence, resilient networks, and it's building transformational capabilities that ARL will be able to deliver in the future for the warfighter. So, for example, we started here and that is where we had ended before. I was assuming it would follow the path that it had gone on before, but it decided, you know, this is a cheaper route to go up here. It got started, and I found its way back to the old route there. I want the robots to, like, sort of follow me along the way, but I don't want it to go off the path because it thinks it's the best path. Having the collaboration between our military personnel and the researchers are a fundamental component of advancing science and furthering the understanding of the needs of our military and the science that our researchers are trying to advance. I've been in the military for 21 years now. I've been assigned to the Army Research Lab for about six months. My background is in the signal field. That's everything from tactical field radios to long-haul communications. They allow military units to communicate and share the information between soldiers in the field and leaders that need to make the decisions. Since being here in ARL, it has widened the aperture tenfold because they conduct research on weapons, materials, autonomy, and it's a very broad subject area. It's absolutely innovative. Whenever there's a new technology or a capability, there's always going to be the first adopters, and the military is always in the forefront of that. ARL researchers are developing technologies that will allow soldiers to team and interface with machines, and this will allow them to make decisions faster, have a broader, more complete information of their environment, and ultimately it's going to allow us to have a leap ahead and ultimately defeat our adversaries.