Advancing Quadruped Autonomy in Military Operations
‘STRIDE’ revolutionizing real-time adaptive locomotion and decision making for complex terrains
Woburn, MA – April 14, 2025 – Robots operating in real-world environments face obstacles that can entangle their legs. Legged robots have the potential to traverse any terrain that their animal counterparts can, navigating around the obstacles that might catch and entangle them, but to do so, they must learn to both choose safe footholds and adjust posture to disentangle their limbs.
To address this challenge, Aptima is partnering with the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) to develop STRIDE (Sophisticated Temporal Robots for Inference-guided Decision Exploration), an adaptive locomotion controller that facilitates real-time learning and decision making in complex and dynamic environments. Building on the foundational work completed under an STTR Phase I, the work in STRIDE Phase II will enhance state estimation, uncertainty management, and proprioceptive-driven navigation through a refined active inference framework. This framework, integrated with multimodal sensor fusion and advanced reinforcement learning algorithms, empowers the robot to autonomously navigate terrains with significant visual obstructions, variable surface properties, and unpredictable obstacles. The STRIDE controller leverages probabilistic models to optimize adaptive behavior, enabling the robot to transition seamlessly from simulated environments to real-world scenarios without extensive pre-training. The system will undergo rigorous validation on the Go2 quadruped platform to ensure that it meets the operational requirements of both military and commercial applications.
When completed, STRIDE will deliver a robust, scalable solution that enhances the robot’s ability to autonomously navigate and perform tasks in highly challenging and dynamic terrains, offering significant advancements in the field of autonomous systems for defense, disaster response, and industrial automation.
STRIDE is a part of Aptima’s Artificial Intelligence Technologies (AIT) portfolio of solutions. AIT designs AI systems to augment human abilities, simplifying complex tasks and improving overall performance. Combining insights from psychology, cognitive science, data science, and engineering, we create robust, intuitive, and effective AI solutions. By partnering with government agencies, industry leaders, and academic institutions, AIT ensures AI technologies address real-world challenges and deliver practical applications.
For more information, please contact aptima_info@aptima.com.
