2026 RAAINS Autonomy Expo
The 2026 RAAINS Autonomy Expo will take place on Monday, 23 March at Lincoln Laboratory’s Autonomous Systems Development Facility (ASDF)–a 17,000-square-foot indoor test facility housed in a hanger on the Hanscom Air Force Base. The Autonomy Expo will be a showcase of various UxV and autonomy demos by MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers.
Expo Attendance
Attendees of the Expo must first arrive and check-in to the Workshop at our main facility at 244 Wood St, Lexington, MA. A complimentary shuttle will be provided to transport attendees to the ASDF. Due to the location of the ASDF on the base, additional security measures will apply. It is recommended that attendees have an active CAC to attend the Autonomy Expo. If you have a CAC, you must have it with you to attend the Expo. If you do not have a CAC, you will be required to provide additional information, no later than 9 March 2026. Additionally, all attendees are required to have a REAL ID compliant credential to access the ASDF on base. Contact us at [email protected] for more information.
Autonomy Al Fresco
This demonstration will showcase real-time hierarchical scene graph mapping technology developed under internal R&D funded program, “autonomy al fresco.” Scene graphs are advantageous for autonomous systems because they map the scene with varying levels of fidelity: dense 3D meshes at the lowest level and sparse regions of interest at the highest level. Here, a Boston Dynamics Spot will map an indoor scene to satisfy a natural language task such as “find fruit.” The robot will then autonomously navigate to the object of interest using only natural language commands like "navigate to the banana in the kitchen."
TNAV
Launched effects (LEs)—air or ground tube-launched uncrewed air systems (UAS)—are an effective intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and targeting asset to the U.S. military. However, new CONOPS for LE deployment are emerging that require collaboratively operating a group of close-flying LEs in challenging and contested environments, including long-distance over-water transit, communications and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) jamming, and counter-UAS interceptor threats. The TNAV program focuses on developing safe and explainable flight autonomy capabilities for multi-agent heterogeneous LE teams cooperatively working to accomplish complex missions in GNSS-denied environments.
SHARC
This demonstration will showcase our algorithms for Scalable Heterogeneous Autonomy for Resilient Coordination (SHARC), which enables large-scale command and control of heterogeneous autonomous agents. Given an initial list of tasks, SHARC creates plans for each agent while maintaining formal guarantees on mission completion. SHARC is able to dynamically replan in response to changing mission conditions and tasks, which is the focus of this demo.
AMIC
AMIC demonstrates leader–follower formation control in a cluttered and contested environment. The leader acts as a moving goal toward which the follower must continuously, reactively, and quickly plan a path while avoiding obstacles along the way. Our cross-modal localization approach does not require GPS nor line-of-sight between vehicles. It uses only lidar sensing and a satellite map prior, thus overcoming contested areas where GPS is denied. To illustrate our method in an indoor environment, we simplify the approach by using motion capture software.