Common technology needs within unmanned and autonomous systems - Final report
Publish date: 2021-02-04
Report number: FOI-R--5096--SE
Pages: 72
Written in: Swedish
Keywords:
- unmanned vehicles
- autonomy
- UAV
- UGV
- USV
- AUV
- navigation
- communication
- law
- ethics
- fauld detection
- recovery
- manned-unmanned teaming
- MUMT
- man-machine-interface
Abstract
The development within the area of unmanned vehicles is vigorous and the technology is proliferating rapidly. A basic knowledge and understanding about how these systems can affect the future warfare in the ground, sea, and air domains is essential in order to support the Swedish Armed Forces future capability development efforts. This knowledge is also critical in order to understand how technical weaknesses can be exploited in order to hinder the opponent from effectively using unmanned systems. The report provides an overview of the activities that have been performed within the project Common technology needs for unmanned and autonomous systems during 2017 to 2020. A broad technology overview has been performed, which describes the state-of-the-art for current unmanned vehicles, the main international development efforts and remaining research challenges that need to be targeted in order to obtain operationally efficient systems. The main research areas that have been targeted are manned-unmanned teaming and humanmachine- interfaces and robust navigation technologies. Pre-studies targeting communication vulnerabilities and possibilities, and methods for fault detection, identification and recovery, have been performed. Legal and ethical considerations concerning the use of autonomy, discussing armed unmanned vehicles in particular, within the Swedish Armed Forces have been addressed. An overview of international and national cooperation activities is also provided.