Battle bots: as driverless cars join the Army, the first autonomous rides on the state's roads could be carrying soldiers.

• Author: Royo, Johanna
• Position: NC TREND: Driverless cars

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Pfc. Hawa Josiah struggles down the long hall from her room in the Warrior Transition Battalion barracks on Fort Bragg. Painful leg, spine and neck injuries have left her on crutches for more than a year, and doctors aren't sure when that will change.

Fortunately, once the 34-year-old soldier reaches the front door, a magic carpet of sorts is waiting to take her down the hill to Womack Army Medical Center, where she has as many as three or four appointments a day.

Josiah's ride looks more like a fancy golf cart than magic carpet, but the two are more similar than they appear. The souped-up golf cart is a test vehicle for the Army's Tank Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center--TARDEC for short--based in Warren, Mich., where the ultimate goal is to create autonomous vehicles to send to war zones.

"What we're learning here will eventually benefit the warfighters on the battlefield," says Ed Straub, program manager for the applied robotics program at TARDEC, which has about 90 civilian scientists working in its automotive research hub. Straub and a team of engineers regularly visit Fort Bragg near Fayetteville. Home to about 50,000 active-duty military personnel and 14,000 civilian workers, the country's largest military installation by population provides plenty of test subjects.

President Obama's 2017 defense budget proposes increasing funding for TARDEC's robotic ground systems from about $7 million to almost $13 million, though that's minor compared with the estimated $30 million investment by tech giant Google with autonomous vehicles that have driven millions of miles. Using the same light radar sensor technology as a Google car, the military's autonomous trucks and tanks could eventually navigate around roadside bombs and other hazards. The Army also is experimenting with driverless transport trucks and tested a convoy of seven tactical unmanned vehicles at more than 40...