Driverless Vehicles Make Inroads in Military - Velodyne Lidar

Driverless Convoys
and Carrying Cargo:
Robotics Lighten the Load
By Brett Davis
Automated technology in the military arena is proceeding
along a variety of fronts, as several companies
around the world are seeking to lighten the
loads of soldiers or keep them out of logistics convoys.
Lockheed Martin is working on both fronts. With the
AutoMate Convoy Module, a bolt-on system of hardware
and software that can convert military trucks into
remote-controlled or self-driving vehicles, it is seeking to
minimize the number of soldiers who need to be present
in convoys.
That’s feeding into the U.S. Army’s AMAS program,
which stands for Autonomous Mobility Applique System,
a Joint Capability Technology Demonstration effort that’s
intended to become a program of record.
Driving convoys in warzones is necessary to resupply soldiers
in the field, but it’s a hazardous duty, and convoys
are a favorite victim of the signature weapon of the Iraq
and Afghanistan wars, the roadside bomb, or improvised
explosive device.
“You could conceivably have a very small number of soldiers
devoted to driving,” says Joe Zinecker, Lockheed
Martin’s director of combat maneuver systems at the Missiles
and Fire Control division. “The system has the capability
to get that down to zero. The lead vehicle could be
unmanned. You could, in theory, have no soldiers driving
it whatsoever,” although he admits that’s a little way off.
The appliqué system that will make up AMAS grew out of
CAST, the Convoy Active Safety Technology system effort
started in 2005 by the Joint Ground Robotics Enterprise
and the Army’s Tank Automotive Research and Development
Engineering Center.
That in turn grew out of the Autonomous Land Vehicle,
or ALV, a hulking, 10-foot-tall self-driving vehicle developed
in 1985 by DARPA and what was then Martin
Marietta (in fact, some of the ALV engineers work on the
AutoMate Module program today).
By the time CAST wrapped up in 2011, it had driven
more than 16,000 miles autonomously with no mishaps
with convoys of as many as five vehicles.
However, the CAST software was “written by engineers
for engineers,” Zinecker says, and anything headed into
the field needs to be easier to fit on various types of vehicles
and be “much more maintainable.”
That’s the goal of the appliqué kit for AMAS, which is still
in the laboratory at the moment. The first field tests are
scheduled for this summer. The company plans to set up
convoy tests, where vehicles must not only avoid obstacles
but other vehicles attempting to interfere with them, just
as they would in the field.
8 MISSION CRITICAL • May 2013