SubscribeIn the early nineties, ABP and its Miniature Remotely Operated Vehicle (MROV) Cyclops provided the world’s EOD community with its first readily available means to remotely deploy EOD tools in confined and difficult to access areas such as those found in buses, planes, trains and residential dwellings.
Through continuous development Cyclops has remained at the forefront of capability and versatility in this rapidly developing market and to this day is the favoured equipment by many of the world's most respected EOD authorities.
However, ABP has recognized that to retain this status against increasing competition and capability, a step change in capability, operability and maintainability is required.
To ensure ABP makes this step change and to ensure the EOD community has the tools it requires to counter the ever increasing threat from global terrorism into the future a significant development programme has been underway at ABP. This programme is ended and we are proud to introduce our next generation ROV/UGV GUARDIAN.
GUARDIAN has been designed against a stringent specification developed and refined over a number of years with reference to the opinions and wishes of both our existing customers and the wider EOD community.
ABP has also examined the many lessons learned during its 15 years of experience in the ROV/UGV field to ensure GUARDIAN takes advantage of appropriate technological developments and appropriate proven and robust technology to successfully translate these requirements into the real world.
ABP have watched with interest the development and launch of competitive products over the last few years and have noted trends for compromises in key operational areas. These compromises are typically seen in areas such as size, where ABP knows from experience that even small increases will greatly compromise ability to access confined spaces such as commuter jets and trains.
Also, limitations in payload carrying capacity have been seen which limit the user's payload carrying options and may compromise the ability of users to utilise their own in service equipments.
GUARDIAN makes no such compromises and will provide the desired step change in capability maintaining ABP firmly at the forefront of the ROV/UGV market.
Operation
The vehicle is operated from a case style Base Station via either a radio or fibre optic link. With GUARDIAN a bespoke soft key control system has been developed to make the job intuitive, simple and above all safe.
Using the combination of soft controls and joysticks the operator can easily switch between functions without compromising driving ability. Vehicle features include two pairs of highly versatile tracked modules, turntable, extending boom and a pan and tilt head.
Also a fibre optic spooler is carried on the rear of the vehicle and comes in either passive or active options. The active version feeds the cable out and has a retraction function with a pinch wheel to clean and a guide to evenly distribute the cable.
Another user controlled feature 'cast' (short burst feed) is available for when a small additional amount of cable is required to be laid out.
Large wheels can be fitted to the outside of the tracked modules to extend the driving capability range of the vehicle to include very rough terrain.
The vehicle has incorporated into it a variety of positional sensors. These feed back to the tablet PC in the Base Station which in turn displays a mimic of the vehicle showing its current status. A collision detection function uses this information to warn of and stop any potential module collisions.
The pan and tilt head is designed specifically to enable searches of areas inside overhead lockers in trains and planes, underneath cars and within a boot / chassis pan and engine bay of a car. The head is also designed to simultaneously carry a disruptor, a manipulator and house the colour zoom camera whilst carrying out these types of searches.
