Small Robots to Undergo U.S. Army Testing
The U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems has begun testing of the first Small Unmanned Ground Vehicles (SUGVs) to arrive at Fort Bliss, Texas.
iRobot is set to deliver 25 SUGVs to Fort Bliss, Texas. (iRobot photo)
The SUGV is a 30-pound tactical robot designed to search for bombs, clear caves and buildings and give soldiers eyes around corners in combat.
In a $6 million deal with FCS lead systems integrator Boeing, iRobot will deliver 25 SUGVs for testing at Fort Bliss by May.
"The robots were ordered to support SUGV acceleration to Fort Bliss," said FCS spokesman Paul Mehney. Last fall, Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, asked the FCS program and the Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) to explore the possibility of accelerating delivery of the SUGV.
"Right now, we have delivered three SUGVs, and we will produce 22 more to be delivered between now and mid-May. This is a system that was originally supposed to be delivered in 2013 or 2010," said retired U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Joe Dyer, president of iRobot's government and industrial division.
Once testing with the 25 robots is complete, TRADOC and FCS program officials will make a recommendation to Army leaders, Mehney said. As of yet, there is no set date specifying when the SUGVs will be sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. However, Army officials were impressed with industry's ability to produce a large number of robots with numerous sensors in a short time.
Demand for the robots has been steadily climbing since soldiers first tested them in February 2006 during the FCS experiment 1.1 at White Sands Missile range, N.M. Also, iRobot has roughly 1,000 PackBot robots with soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan; their lifesaving performance in combat has influenced FCS' acceleration of the SUGV.
"The robot goes in there first, where there are adversaries, tripwires or bombs," Dyer said. "FCS brings robots into the big Army. When we first arrived, there was skepticism among the troops. Two weeks later, there was as dramatic a turnaround as you could possibly see. We had a literal struggle on our hands to get the troops to let them go."
The first group of FCS SUGV robots will deploy with commercial off-the-shelf sensors, not FCS sensors. Nor will they have Joint Tactical Radio Systems, the software-programmable radio designed to move images, video and data or the full C4ISR suite that makes up the core of the FCS network, Dyer said.
The SUGV can pass imagery onto the network and has multispectral, electro-optical infrared sensors, he said.
Dyer said emerging compression technologies allow the robot to move large amounts of video instantly.
"When you are controlling a robot, if the time delay is greater than 125 milliseconds, it is a bother to the operator who has to accommodate for it," he said.
Compression algorithms allow the robot to transfer the information in smaller sizes to maintain high resolution, Dyer said.
In the months ahead, iRobot may add to the SUGV chemical, biological and radiation sensors such as the company's ICX FIDO kit, which examines the air for explosive residue.
Also, the Army Research Night Vision Lab is working on through-the-wall X-ray technology and ground-penetrating radar so that robots can detect buried explosives, Dyer said.
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