Army Funds $18 Million New Autonomous Vehicle Research Center

A new research center in South Carolina will develop "virtual” prototypes to help the Army equip its vehicles — which often need to travel off-road — with self-driving capabilities.

Clemson University received $18 million in Defense Department funding to establish the Virtual Prototyping of Ground Systems (VIPR-GS) Center at its International Center for Automotive Research in Greenville, South Carolina. Clemson and the U.S. Army Ground Vehicle Systems Center will partner on a multi-year research effort involving more than 65 Clemson faculty across seven engineering departments.

Zoran Filipi, who chairs the university’s automotive engineering department, will serve as founding director.

"The VIPR Center will be an essential part of a Ground Vehicle Modeling and Simulation Alliance that GVSC will rely on as it leads the U.S. Army in the integration of new capabilities into military ground vehicles,” David Gorsich, chief scientist at the Ground Vehicle Systems Center, said in the announcement.

Clemson officials said the project would focus on off-road autonomy, propulsion systems, and digital engineering. Researchers will build virtual models and simulations for off-road vehicles with "advanced electrified propulsion, situational intelligence, AI-enabled autonomy, and team-routing algorithms.”

Under the final phase, breakthrough innovations from the VIPR-GS Center will be fabricated and validated by Clemson’s Deep Orange prototyping program.

Officials noted that virtual prototyping of autonomous capabilities would reach far beyond the military or automotive sectors to "significantly reduce timelines for innovation.”