HIRRV

HIRRV, short for High-Integrity Robotic Research Vehicle, is a modular unmanned ground vehicle designed to support autonomous robotics research and field testing. Conceived as a flexible, low-cost research platform, HIRRV is intended to serve universities, laboratories, and industry partners seeking a common testbed for perception, planning, and manipulation algorithms. The platform emphasizes configurability, ruggedness, and compatibility with widely used software stacks.

Hardware and software features include a modular chassis with all-wheel drive and interchangeable payload bays, allowing researchers to mount different sensors, actuators, or manipulation grippers. Sensor suites commonly include LIDAR, stereo or depth cameras, thermal imaging, and hyperspectral options. The vehicle runs on an onboard computer cluster with ROS 2 compatibility, support for edge AI accelerators, and standard communication interfaces for teleoperation and remote monitoring. Power is supplied by swappable battery modules designed for rapid field replacement.

Development and variants: HIRRV originated from collaborations among several universities and industry partners in the late 2010s, with subsequent iterations—HIRRV-1, HIRRV-2—focusing on increased payload, greater ruggedness, and improved autonomy stacks. The design emphasizes open hardware and software interfaces to promote interoperability and reproducibility of experiments.

Applications and impact: HIRRV has been used in academic studies of simultaneous localization and mapping, multi-robot coordination, and autonomous manipulation in cluttered environments, as well as in disaster-response drills and environmental monitoring. By providing a common platform, it has facilitated cross-institutional collaboration and helped standardize benchmarking for robotic autonomy research.