SATELLITE HELP FOR ROBO-​​CARS

There are a whole heap of rea­sons why the Army’s new squad of killer drones will be remote-​​controlled by blood-​​and-​​guts sol­diers, instead of roam­ing around Iraq on their own.
One is that unmanned ground vehi­cles, or UGVs, still aren’t par­tic­u­larly good at nav­i­gat­ing around uncer­tain ter­rain.
Just look at what hap­pened dur­ing last Spring’s Pentagon-​​funded robot rally through the Mojave Desert. No robo-​​car made it more than a few miles with­out get­ting stuck in a ditch some­where.
Everybody at his roboti­cist brother has a solu­tion for fix­ing this. One idea over at the Army’s Tank-​​Automotive and Armaments Command, or TACOM, is to load the UGV up with satel­lite imagery, to let the bot know what’s ahead.
Robots today often get ele­va­tion data how high the obsta­cles are in its way but the con­sis­tency of the ground is often unknown. But by snap­ping pic­tures in the vis­i­ble, infrared, and other ranges, a satel­lite can cob­ble together a pretty decent pic­ture of the land below: what’s mud, what’s solid earth, and what’s a pile of rocks.
With that infor­ma­tion in hand, a sol­dier can plot out a path for the UGV that gives the robot a bet­ter chance of suc­cess­fully mak­ing it through the trip. The vari­a­tions are small, but cru­cial, TACOM engi­neer Phil Frederich said. In test­ing at Ft. Knox about two months ago, an unmanned Stryker, dri­ving on roads, often moved from the mid­dle by a foot or two. It wasn’t much. But it helped the robot make it through the course in one piece.

December 3rd, 2004 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.