SSC San Diego TR 1869, November 2001

This report compiles Lessons Learned from several unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) programs that could be relevant to the objectives of the Very Shallow Water (VSW) Mine Countermeasures (MCM) and Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV) program. Lessons Learned were collected from over 50 experts within the UGV community, through interviews and reviews of published work. Lessons Learned were also inferred from an analysis of the evolution of certain UGV efforts. The Lessons Learned are organized and presented in this report within three general areas: operations, programmatics, and technologies. The recurring operational Lessons Learned involve issues of control unmanned vehicles operating among and in collaboration with humans. Aside from the technological deficiencies of onboard information processing, and of the persistent use of open-loop sensing in teleoperated and supervisory controlled vehicles, the difficulties in control result primarily from communication problems. Most control strategies now depend upon communications, and communications are undependable, because there are many vulnerabilities in its chain, including the likelihood of jamming in tactical situations. The problems of communications and control, common to the UGV environment, are exacerbated for VSW mine countermeasure tasks by the opacity to radio frequency (RF) energy, multipath for sound, and other sources of noise in that environment. Control remains a significant operational problem on land and in the water. The recurring programmatic Lessons Learned involved the management of customer expectations and the definition of useful products, both of which generally exceed the prevailing technological possibilities and, as a consequence, limit opportunities for funding. Involving the user/customer early in the development cycle, often through operational testing of prototypes, successfully shaped expectations and defined and developed a few feasible applications. Because robotics applications are new to the operational environment, it is important to provide useful products in the beginning that will engender user acceptance of the technology and facilitate the necessary research and development (R&D) to provide the required capabilities. The recurring technology Lessons Learned clustered around the problems of making sense out of the available onboard sensor data to automatically generate appropriate UGV control commands. Human perception, which permits successful teleoperation, is beyond the capabilities of contemporary machine perception algorithms. The workaround solutions generally have involved non-human mechanisms (i.e., short-range sound navigation and ranging (SONAR) for automatic object detection indoors , mid-range laser detection and ranging (LADAR) for automatic object detection, the global positioning system (GPS) for automatic localization out-of-doors, tags for cooperative target …