SubscribeFollowing the publication of the 260 page study Technology Development for Army Unmanned Ground Vehicles by the THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS in Washington DC the US Government established the lines of development of Unmanned Ground Vehicles for the coming years.
The aforementioned study explains which kind of use UGVs we will be seeing on the field in the following two decades and which lines of development should be pursued. In the proposed guidelines much attention is given to the issue of autonomous behaviour over tele-operation and the ideal goal seems to be the attainment of active UGVs that can execute complex missions characterized by very high levels of complex behaviour, including friend/foe recognition and attack with minimal levels of human intervention.
While such capacities are of undiscussed interest and must be sought for, we however believe that, on short term, they might be of hindrance to the development of simpler and more effective teleoperated systems which could grant very similar field achievements with much shorter terms and at lower costs. Current technology, although constantly accelerating, still has significant limitations in processing power that makes fully autonomous systems not yet feasible. On the other hand the field of data transmission, due to the great amount of research and development that has been done for commercial purposes such as Internet and mobile cell phones, we see technologies constantly on the move and already capable of granting performances that hold great potential for the UGV market.
While in autonomous systems the main focus is at navigation, obstacle recognition and avoidance, friend/foe recognition and decision capacities, all of which need big amounts of computing power and present a serious challenge both on hardware and software, the teleoperated systems shift this burden over to an operator located at a distance from the unit and focus on the UGV’s capabilities of data and video transmission, manoeuvring and use of active subsystems.
Depending on the distance between the operator and the UGV the problem of bidirectional data transmission can be trivial (short range systems) or quite complex (satellite guidance) but in both cases there is already available on the market a great range of tested systems which are capable, to a certain extent, of answering these needs. The issue of manoeuvre is indeed a crucial one for UGV systems since, both in autonomous and teleoperated systems; it is essential for the functionality of the vehicle.
In this case the technology is surely mature and what is needed is a correct innovative approach to the issue. Most of the systems that have been tested lately show a typical tracked design that dates back to the first UGV systems tested by the German Army back in World War II such as the "Goliath" (Sd.Kfz. 3 02/303a/303b) wire-controlled light demolition carrier, which was the first UGV to be built.
The Goliath was used as a mobile, armored explosive platform for pillbox, obstacle, and stronghold destruction. Resembling a squat mini-tank (see pictures), it was one meter long, propelled by two automobile starter motors or a 2-cylinder gasoline engine, and held an 85-kg TNT "bunker-buster" charge. An operator controlled and detonated this device through a 400-meter electric cable, which spooled from the rear of a "mother" vehicle or trailer.
The first field use of this unit was in 1944 and it is most surprising to see how platform design for UGVs has advanced little since then. This lack of advancement is mostly due to the evolution of current UGV designs from platforms designed for Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) in which mobility is not a fundamental issue. Most of today’s UGVs carry this flaw in design which shows how the tracked design, although far inferior to other designs both in speed, handling and energy efficiency, is still the leading style due to UGV systems being developments of earlier EOD vehicles or heavily influenced by previous work and experience in such units.
In this rather uniform panorama some players have tried some innovation, amongst them DARPA is surely the most prolific, up to date, in proposing new designs, without however managing yet to displace the tracked vehicle as the standard unit.
Macroswiss is now proposing a new platform, the experimental Tankbot unit (see picture), which is characterized by being a wheeled vehicle with a novel vertebral column concept, which potentially solves several problems of the tracked vehicle design. The Tankbot (which will be covered in detail in the next article about the ECC concept), thanks to the flexible column design and all wheel drive configuration, can be tuned to give better speed performance than similar tracked vehicles while solving the problem of the camera angle when handling obstacles since the flexibility of the systems grants that the camera will always have a parallel angle with the ground plane even when the vehicle is driving over very irregular surfaces.
Another advantage of the Tankbot concept is that, since every module has its own propulsion, it is possible to add extra modules if there is a need for unexpected payloads without affecting performance in a significant manner.
Regarding the issue of active and passive subsystems for UGVs the market currently offers an almost unlimited choice of systems which could easily be fitted to a remotely operated Unmanned Platform in order to give it the possibility to perform a great variety of tasks. Amongst the possible subsystems we can highlight the following:
- Sensors
- Optical systems
- Radio beacons
- Radio repeaters
- Manipulators
- Plasma cutters
- Video cameras
- Moveable turrets
- GPS systems
- Weapon Systems
- Smaller robot deploying systems and communication systems
- Explosive ordnance
For the majority of these systems the necessary technology is already present and, given an adequate platform on which to install it, the possibility of a small to medium sized teleoperated combat UGV does not seem very far away. The original need for UGV systems, which is important to remember and keep in mind, is that of minimizing risk to ground troops in combat situations while granting technological superiority. Given the records of the recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq it is very obvious that it was the ground forces that paid the highest tribute of casualties, many of which were the result of situations where an efficient UGV system could have possibly been instrumental in avoiding them.
In many of these situations autonomous behaviour would not have been of any specific use, while a teleoperated active unit would have instead granted the superiority needed to avoid useless risks. We therefore believe that it is necessary to work more in the direction of tele-presence, rather than towards the holy grail of autonomous behaviour in order to start cashing in on technology, which is available and ready to be used on the battlefield to grant the same level of superiority that it has granted in aerial and naval warfare.
Can we really afford to focus on a long term goal of near science-fiction units capable of behaving in a fully autonomous manner while we have the possibility of reaching very similar performances with teleoperated units in a much shorter term? We at Macroswiss believe that the answer to this question is rather obvious and therefore we are working in the direction of the development of a multi-purpose all terrain remotely operated platform that can be capable of active presence on the battlefield in order to gain complete technological superiority even in the elusive short-quarter urban guerrilla scenarios that are increasingly common in modern warfare.
We believe that the best way of deploying a soldier in such a situation is to send him on the scene by proxy through a teleoperated system, which conveys all the necessary information and can act as an extension of the operator’s body at a distance. With this approach we can attain all the characteristics of an autonomous system (obstacle recognition and avoidance, friend/foe recognition cognitive decision capacities) through the utilization of the most powerful supercomputer available on earth today: the human brain.
