Manned - Unmanned Vehicles Convoy

This paper describes the project undertaken by DSO National Laboratories to demonstrate convoy movement involving a manned vehicle and two Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) along roads and dirt tracks at speeds up to 35 km/h and 20 km/h respectively. The project work included development of UGV hardware, vehicle controller, sensor suite comprising of short and long range sensors, and high speed navigation algorithms. The long-range sensors allow the UGV to plan a coarse path early, leaving the local terrain navigation to be done instantaneously with higher resolution sensing from the short-range sensors. Navigation behaviors such as front vehicle following, way-point following, road following and obstacle avoidance were developed and tested to enable the UGV to maneuver robustly under varying environments and scenarios. The project also explored the concept of MannedUnmanned vehicles team. Some basic tactical behaviors such as Line Up, Convoy Movement, Admin Halt and Tactical Halt were developed and demonstrated on the UGVs. It was confirmed that by equipping the UGVs with these behaviors, the warfighter was able to operate the UGVs easier via the Operator Control Unit (OCU). Throughout the project, a series of data collection and testing for the individual modules were conducted to understand the optimal system configuration that can best meet the performance specifications. A final demonstration in our local terrain was conducted to validate the performance of the UGV