Imagine a job like, planetary exploration, Mission Mars, or other space mission, Earth atmospheric monitoring, war time surveillance & attack operations, under sea exploration, deep earth research, or a case of avoiding human mistakes, vehicles are required that can perform in extreme conditions. Humans have limitations is such areas, due to safety & survival reasons. Here come the Un-manned vehicles in picture that can operate without direct human control on the board. In this article, so shall talk about different types of unmanned vehicles.
An unmanned vehicle is the one with no pilot on board. UVs can be remote controlled aircraft (flown by a remote pilot) or can travel autonomously based on pre-programmed plans or more complex dynamic automation systems. UVs are currently used for a number of missions, including reconnaissance and attack roles. The unmanned vehicles can be sub-categories as follows:
- Unmanned ground vehicle (UGV)
- Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a “drone”
- Unmanned surface vehicle (USV), for the operation on the surface of the water
- Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) or unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV), for the operation underwater
- Unmanned spacecraft
Unmanned ground vehicles
The unmanned ground vehicle is:
- A powered, mobile, ground conveyance that does not have a human aboard;
- can be operated in one or more modes of control (autonomous, semi-autonomous, teleoperation, remote control);
- can be expendable or recoverable;
- and can have lethal or nonlethal mission modules.
An autonomous UGV is essentially an autonomous robot that operates without the need for a human controller. The vehicle uses its sensors to develop some limited understanding of the environment, which is then used by control algorithms to determine the next action to take in the context of a human provided mission goal. This fully eliminates the need for any human to watch over the menial tasks that the UGV is completing.
UGVs are military standard, cutting edge, user-oriented, multi-purpose vehicles for Defense, Law Enforcement and Public Safety missions. They provide complete operational and tactical control, overall mission management and enhanced force coordination. The UGV family consists of the Micro Tactical Ground Robot (MTGR), the Individual Robotic Intelligence System (IRIS) and the Professional Robot (PROBOT).
A variety of potential UGV applications to land operations can increase mission performance, combat effectiveness, and personnel safety. These include detection, neutralization, and breaching of minefields and other obstacles; RSTA; UXO clearance; EOD; physical security; logistics; fire-fighting; urban warfare; weapons employment; and operations in contaminated and other denied areas.
A fully autonomous robot may have the ability to:
ü Collect information about the environment, such as building maps of building interiors.
ü Detect objects of interest such as people and vehicles.
ü Travel between waypoints without human navigation assistance.
ü Work for extended durations without human intervention.
ü Avoid situations that are harmful to people, property or itself, unless those are part of its design specifications
ü Disarm, or remove explosives.
ü Repair itself without outside assistance.
Some examples of remote-operated UGV technology are, Unmanned Snatch Land Rover, Frontline Robotics Teleoperated UGV (TUGV), Gladiator Tactical Unmanned Ground Vehicle (used by the United States Marine Corps), iRobot PackBot, Foster-Miller TALON, Remotec ANDROS F6A, Autonomous Solutions Chaos, Mesa Associates Tactical Integrated Light-Force Deployment Assembly (MATILDA), Vecna Robotics Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot (BEAR), G-NIUS Autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicles Guardium, Robowatch ASENDRO, Kairos Autonomi – Pronto4 System, Ripsaw MS1, DRDO Daksh, VIPeR, DOK-ING mine clearing, firefighting, and underground mining UGV’s, MacroUSA Armadillo V2 Micro UGV (MUGV) and Scorpion SUGV, Nova 5, RC Rover® Unmanned Ground Systems, Krymsk APC and many more.
Unmanned Arial vehicles
The U.S. military began experimenting with unmanned aircraft as early as World War I. By World War II, unmanned craft could be controlled by radio signals, usually from another aircraft. Vehicles that could return from a mission and be recovered appeared in the late 1950s. Today, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) perform a wide range of missions and are used by all four branches of the military. Apart from military, USVs, has became the most important member of UVs family.
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone and referred to as a Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), is an aircraft without a human pilot aboard. Its flight is controlled either autonomously by onboard computers or by the remote control of a pilot on the ground or in another vehicle. The typical launch and recovery method of an unmanned aircraft is by the function of an automatic system or an external operator on the ground. Historically, UAVs were simple remotely piloted aircraft, but autonomous control is increasingly being employed. Drones of all types have already been used in a wide range of practical ways, including:
ü Archaeological surveying.
ü Science, in general.
ü Environmental/meteorology; e.g., climate study, storm monitoring, mapping glaciers, general data collection.
ü Military — surveillance, air strikes.
ü Security — surveillance, crowd monitoring and control.
ü Law enforcement — surveillance, traffic monitoring, search and rescue operations, aiding hostage situations and for bomb threats, tracking a fleeing criminal.
ü Firefighting — forest and fire monitoring, risk management.
ü Healthcare, including medical supplies delivery. E.g., vaccines, defibrillators to people in emergencies, or other supplies, especially in remote areas.
ü Farming — crop and livestock monitoring.
ü Meat plant inspections, including catching companies dumping animal blood into nearby bodies of water.
ü Commercial use — delivery. Amazon’s Jeff Bezo’s talked about future delivery by drone.
ü Aerial photography, including architectural photography, photographing music festivals.
ü Shooting movies, TV shows TV commercials.
ü Thermography — inspection of solar systems, wind turbines, power lines using thermal imaging cameras.
ü Land inspection and surveying.
ü As scarecrows, to scare large flocks of geese near public parks in Ottawa, Canada.
ü Pipeline and oil rig inspection using infrared cameras.
ü Crop management, including spraying and watering.
ü Monitoring marine life, including whale watching.
ü Wildlife conservation, including tracking orangutans in Sumatra and a monitoring several endangered species. Namibia has teamed up with the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) to fly drones over national parks, in hopes of spotting poachers, as well as monitoring animals.
There are several types of drones that can be used collectively for the purposes describes, here we are mentioning some of the major ones.
- Quadcopters, as well those with 6 or even 8 blades.
- Larger unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that resemble small helicopters and planes, and sometimes even larger planes.
- Microdrones, which are insects-sized and sometimes insect-shaped, and having flapping wings. There are also somewhat larger bird-inspired drones with flapping wings.
- Bird and Insect Dron, Microdrones, the result of insect-inspired flying vehicles. The British military has used insect-shaped microdrones for scouting missions in Afghanistan. Other insect- and bird-inspired drones include the Nano Hummingbird, Dragonfly and RoboBee. The RoboBees creator, Rob Wood, speculates that they could be used in swarms at disaster sites to search for survivors.
- Drone Swarms, Robotic insect swarms are actually difficult to produce because of limitations on battery life, especially at microdrone sizes. However, Hungarian researchers have managed to assemble a team of 10 drones that self-organize themselves as they fly. These quadcopters have GPS, wireless radios and processors which collectively allow the pack to navigate in a formation, follow a leader, and more.
- Killer Drones, While most uses of drones are non-destructive, some are used for unmanned military strikes against enemies. Usually referred to as UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, some of which carrying missiles. • While drones are remotely controlled, some can take off and land on their own, even from aircraft carriers. For military applications, Drones are getting safer to operate. 38 Predators and Reapers crashed in Iraq and Afghanistan as of September 2012 or earlier. However, Predators get 7.5 accidents per 100K hours of flight — a decrease from 20 accidents per 100K hours in 2005. A Global Hawk eats up data communication bandwidths of 500MB (Megabytes) per second — which is 5 times the total bandwidth used by the whole U.S. Military during 1991 Gulf War. The Air Force of USA is hoping for a super/ hyper-sonic drone by 2034.
Unmanned Spacecrafts
Exploring moon & starts has always been a dream of human generation, but that was not really easy, reaching to the million of Km far off space, not-knowing the environment & geographical situation of solar elements and many other factors make it Impossible for the human, to step into space. Then came in the Un-manned spacecrafts. Space probes are spacecraft that can visit other planets without the need for astronauts. They can send back information about things such as the:
- temperature, magnetic field strength and radiation levels
- gravitational field strength
- The surroundings, including the composition of any atmosphere.
The evolution of these space crafts, makes its possible for human-to visit outer space in later times. Spacecrafts have been going into space since February 24, 1949, when the United States launched the Bumper-WAC at White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. It was a two-stage rocket consisting of a WAC Corporal sounding rocket atop a German-made V2. As it reached an altitude of 244 miles (393 km), it became the first object made by humans to enter outer space. So-far over 1,000 unmanned missions have been sent into space to explore our solar system. NASA has launched both exploration and communication satellites into orbit.
Unmanned spacecraft may have varying levels of autonomy from human input, they may be remote controlled, remote guided or even autonomous (“robotic”). Many habitable spacecraft also have varying levels of robotic features. For example the space stations Salyut 7 and Mir, and the ISS module Zarya were capable of unmanned remote guided station-keeping, and docking maneuvers with both resupply craft and new modules. The most common unmanned spacecraft categories are robotic spacecraft, unmanned resupply spacecraft, space probes and space observatories.
Some of the missions undertaken by such craft include:
- Viking 1 and Viking 2 (landed on Mars in the 1970s, took photographs and analyzed soil samples)
- Mars Global Surveyor (went into orbit around Mars in 1997 and mapped the surface in 3D)
- Spirit and Opportunity (two robot vehicles that landed on Mars in 2004).
- Unmanned space probes do not need to carry food, water or oxygen. They can withstand conditions that would be lethal to astronauts.
Unmanned spacecraft are cheaper than manned spacecraft, and safer, as they do not carry any astronauts. It is very difficult to repair an unmanned spacecraft in Earth’s orbit, and impossible once it leaves orbit. So the components are designed to be rugged and reliable. But history shows that systems in unmanned spacecraft do fail. This may mean that parts of the mission cannot be completed. Sometimes the whole mission is lost.
Unmanned surface vehicle (USV) & Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV)
Unmanned surface vehicles (USV) or autonomous surface vehicles (ASV) are vehicles that operate on the surface of the water without a crew. USVs are valuable in oceanography, as they are more capable than moored or drifting weather buoys, but far cheaper than the equivalent weather ships and research vessels, and more flexible than commercial-ship contributions. Wave gliders, in particular, harness wave energy for primary propulsion and, with solar cells to power their electronics, have months of marine persistence for both academic and naval applications. Military applications for USVs include powered seaborne targets. Operational USVs with offensive capability include the Israeli Protector USV.
An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is a robot which travels underwater without requiring input from an operator. AUVs constitute part of a larger group of undersea systems known as unmanned underwater vehicles, a classification that includes non-autonomous remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) – controlled and powered from the surface by an operator/pilot via an umbilical or using remote control. In military applications AUVs are more often referred to simply as unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs). AUVs have been used for a limited number of tasks dictated by the technology available. With the development of more advanced processing capabilities and high yield power supplies, AUVs are now being used for more and more tasks with roles and missions constantly evolving.
Conclusion
With the advent of time, research & technology has extended its feet to impossible areas for humans, like, undersea, under earth, outer space, and chemical or nuclear war zones. Apart it is found that existing applications can be done more easily with the help of robots. For all above mentioned applications, un-manned vehicles have proved to be an answer. Un-manned vehicles provide not only approach to the impossible areas, but also perform the task in better speed and performance as compared to humans.
