RoboticsUnmanned ground vehicles patrol city streets
Designing air or sea unmanned vehicles is relatively straightforward because at sea, and in the air, there are hardly any obstacles; designing an unmanned ground vehicle, however, is much tougher; the U.S. Army, after decades of trying, has succeeded in building one
As the war in Afghanistan intensifies, the U.S. Army wants to see more robots replacing soldiers on dangerous missions. Strategy Page reports that the Army”s decades long effort to develop a practical autonomous UGV (unmanned ground vehicle) has succeeded. Earlier this month, two T2 vehicles equipped with sensors and control equipment successfully passed realistic tests. One of the test subjects, controlled from a Stryker wheeled armored vehicle, successfully approached a village (equipped with mannequins set up as pedestrians along the streets), did a perimeter sweep at speeds of up to fifty kilometers an hour, then patrolled the streets, avoiding the pedestrians, and finally departed the area. The sensor systems uses a combination of ladar (laser radar), digital cameras, and heat sensors to provide the software with sufficient data to enable the onboard computers to identify and avoid obstacles. The key element here was the software, which, in turn, benefited from five years of competitive events that delivered software advances faster than expected.
Two years ago, for the third time since 2004, DARPA sponsored a race for robotic vehicles (see 24 June 2008 HSNW). For several decades, the U.S. Department of Defense has been trying to build a robotic vehicle.In early 2004, however, the Department of Defense decided to try something different, and give enterprising civilian organizations a chance to show what they could do. DARPA held the DARPA Grand Challenge. The challenge: the first robotic vehicle (moving completely under software control, with no human intervention) that could complete a 240 kilometer course, would get a million dollars for its designers. No one even came close. A second Challenge, held in late 2005, yielded several finishers, and the first one picked up the million dollar prize for navigating a 212 kilometers cross country course in just under seven hours. All vehicles operated under software control, as true robots. The third Challenge race was held in late 2007, and had a two million dollar prize for the first vehicle to complete a 60 kilometer course through an urban environment (an abandoned air force base) in under six hours.
Strategy Page notes that much progress has been made, but the basic problem is, and always has been, that there are a lot more obstacles for a robotic land vehicles to deal with on its own. At sea, and in the air, it is a much different, and much simpler, situation. Over a century ago, naval torpedoes were built that could
