Terrain Navigation Concepts For Autonomous Vehicles

There is rising interest in autonomous systems for future military environments. Systems that can take mission directives and then plan and conduct the desired mission will deeply involve aspects of machine intelligence for terrain navigation. Can we build such a system? The answer is "Yes, but definitely not today." Explanation of this answer requires reasons why today's technologies will not support autonomous vehicles and rationale for expecting these capabilities in the future. These reasons and rationale are presented by first defining functional requirements for an autonomous vehicle and its subsystems. Then the functional requirements are linked to technologies. The state of todays technologies and those expected in the future are outlined. Planned Army and DARPA programs in semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles are described and shown to be the basis for future optimism for autonomous vehicles in the Army. Particular emphasis is given to terrain navigation concepts that will be generic for any type of autonomous ground vehicle.