Automation Kit for Dual-Mode Military Unmanned Ground Vehicle for Surveillance Missions

The field of autonomous vehicles is an area of great importance nowadays among Intelligent Transport Systems. These autonomous vehicles must meet high standards of robustness, safety and protection to make autonomous driving safer than human driving, thus improving current accident rates and energy efficiency, so its complete implementation in the market is expected in the long term. However, there are other areas, such as the agricultural and military sectors, where the demand for technologies related to autonomous driving is also high but the applicability could be faster. In this sense, the unmanned ground military vehicles (UGV) are a technology available in international armies for some years, but that is still subject to a series of technical, logistical and material limitations that reduce its applicability. This paper presents an automation kit for transforming military service vehicles into military UGVs, developed through the transfer of autonomous vehicle technology from the civil sector to the military sector. This kit has been installed in a quite common vehicle of the Spanish army, in order to provide two functional capabilities: autonomous navigation and teleoperation, in off-road environments with minimal or no traffic marks or infrastructure aids. The vehicle equipped with this kit is oriented to different missions such as circulation in convoys, operation as tele-operated probe vehicle and perimeter surveillance. The automation kit involves no permanent modifications in the vehicle that can be driven manually when desired, allows vehicles to be used both in missions in conflict zones and to support operations in emergencies and natural catastrophes, and can be easily installed in any kind of vehicle.

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