[Engineering Feature]
Unmanned Military Vehicles: Robots On The Rise
These mighty machines are taking to the land, sea, and sky to keep soldiers out of harm’s way.
SprayCool uses a two-phase liquid-cooling solution. The trick is that SprayCool’s technology can work with air- or conductioncooled boards with minimal modification. SprayCool’s enclosures are sealed while providing high levels of cooling.
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AUTONOMOUS CHALLENGES Remote-control vehicles dominate military applications because of their reliability. Keeping a human in the loop can be important, because making critical decisions with limited or contradictory information is still best done by people.
This works well with remote-control vehicles as long as communication can be maintained reliably. Unfortunately, reliable communications isn’t always possible. It may not even be desirable in some instances, since it could potentially give away the position of the robot or its controller.
The current state of autonomous affairs is highlighted by competitions like DARPA’s Grand Challenge and its recent Urban Challenge, where teams built autos that faced demanding courses without any drivers at all (see “Autonomous Vehicles Tackle The Urban Jungle,” ED Online 13115).
Fully autonomous military vehicles with limited intelligence like cruise missiles are used already. But applications such as ground vehicles require greater intelligence due to the more complex environment and conditions. A flying cruise missile always ends in destruction, which isn’t a desirable characteristic for ground vehicles designed to deliver supplies.
Still, a semi-autonomous mode is often attainable. In semiautonomous mode, a robot vehicle will be given a simple command such as fly a particular route and notify the pilot or operator if the sensors detect something interesting. Likewise, having a vehicle follow a person or another vehicle is a comparatively easy task.
Be they large or small, airborne or aquatic, unmanned vehicles will continue to improve and be deployed more heavily in the future. Significant improvements are in the works, but major design challenges remain, especially as these robots move toward autonomous operation.
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