Unmanned Vehicles: Overview and Recommendations
Publish date: 2012-05-11
Report number: FOI-R--3319--SE
Pages: 123
Written in: Swedish
Keywords:
- Unmanned Vehicles
- Robotics
- UAV
- UGV
- AUV
- ASV
Abstract
Unmanned vehicles are being used in many conicts around the world today. This report gives a broad overview of the eld of unmanned vehicles, and includes suggestions of how a future research activity within the eld might look like. The overview is focussed on both systems and capabilities, as well as activities that are relevant for the Swedish Armed forces. By applying the capability areas dened in the armed forced development plan (FMUP) to both commercial systems and possible scenarios, we strive to limit the scope of the report to the most relevant topics. The recommendations are based upon a review of the development documents of the Swedish Armed Forces, as well as visits to units operating unmanned systems today, and the overview described above. The suggestions are as follows. Broad, cross-disciplinary projects focussing on system types, e.g. UAV, UGV etc, should be formed. These should be interacting with the procurement process, and dierent level of planning activities. They should also bring together competencies across FHS and FOI, survey current research state-of- the-art, through competitions, conferences and collaborations, and transfer the results to the armed forces through demonstrations and simulations of systems and subsystems. Simulations in particular are well suited to illustrate the benets and drawbacks of a particular unmanned systems, as the interaction with such systems is mostly carried out through the computers of the control stations, even for the real systems. In this way, participants from the armed forces can get a feeling for both threats and possibilities associated with the dierent future and contemporary systems, which will be of use to both tactic development and procurement activities.