 As part of a strategy to develop and deliver new robotics capabilities to future soldiers, Army researchers have partnered with world-renowned experts in industry and academia. The University of Pennsylvania hosted a series of meetings in Philadelphia June 5th through the 7th, where principal investigators and researchers from the Army's Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance were R-C-T-A. So, certainly the problem that we are working on is very hard. It's recognized by a lot of people as, you know, it's not quite general artificial intelligence type stuff, but it is very difficult to operate robots in the wild, you know, anywhere in the world, and that's the kind of problem the Army has to solve. And the collaboration we have is with some of the world's best. The group formed in 2009 to bring together government, industrial and academic institutions to address research and development required to enable the deployment of future military unmanned ground vehicle systems ranging in size from manned portables to ground combat vehicles. Partners include General Dynamic Land Systems Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University, the Robotics Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Florida State University, the University of Central Florida, the University of Pennsylvania, Kinetic North America, and Caltech Jet Propulsion Lab. The thing that most encourages me is that we have ARL researchers doing joint research and collaborative papers with the best in the world from these universities. In order for robots to be teammates, he said, they must operate in unstructured, complex environments. We're trying to go from tools to teammates. So, we want robots to not be a tool that you use like for IEDs, exploration where you have to teleoperate it, we're trying to get them to be true teammates so that you can work side by side with them. So, for example, you can articulate what you want the robot to do as your teammate and do those missions jointly or maybe you send the robot out and have the robot be able to communicate back to you what it's doing, what it saw in human understandable terms, not in robot specific terms, which humans don't understand. Over the past eight years of the Alliance, researchers have achieved many milestones in the robotics field. Collaboration is essential to what we do in Army research laboratory in order to access the best and brightest talent around the nation through the robotic CTA, the partners that we have have allowed Army objectives and research for the long term to be realized over a multi-year investment and collaboration with outside partners. The laboratory is focused on transitioning new capabilities to industry partners so they can continue to mature them. So the bottom line is that soldiers of the future who face very fierce near-pair adversaries will rely on the research that we're doing today to help them to maintain technological overmatch over an enemy which frankly we can hardly imagine today. The researchers said the meetings in Philadelphia were a valuable experience as they continue to plan for a capstone event where they will demonstrate the culmination of their research achievements to Army leaders. In order for the robots to be a useful teammate, they have to be able to communicate naturally like a human does and so we're doing a lot of work in human-robot relationships so understanding concepts in the same way that humans do, trying to get the robots to understand those concepts in the same way so that the teaming can occur more naturally.