Road Warrior

Current UGVs are slow, and he says they typically run six to eight kilometres per hour. Quanser’s goal is to raise that by as much as they can since slow UGVs make bomb disposal teams easy targets for ambush and often result in accidental flip-overs when users attempt to operate the vehicles at higher speeds.

As for the communication side of things, senior project manager Andrew Dawes says the challenges creating a fully haptic-enabled remote vehicle are substantial. “We’ll have a base station PC, where the operator will sit and that’s where we’ll have the visual cues and haptic feedback, that will communicate via wireless link to the remote vehicle,” he says, adding that they’re currently experimenting with various radios. “Part of the issue there is the delays in the wireless transmission and making sure that’s robust and reliable. We can’t have failures, and if the delays are too large it causes problems with the haptic feedback.”

According to Gilbert, accurate haptic control requires a closed loop rate of 1000 Hz. Plainly stated, this means the machine and the user must be able to communicate with input and output information at a minimum of 1,000 times per second. Advanced sensing technology will also be incorporated to ensure the UGV is as intuitive as possible.

Quanser’s UGV development began in January 2008 after being awarded with $400,000 in funding from NRC-IRAP. Development will continue throughout the year and a prototype is expected by the fall, with the aim of producing fully deployable units by early 2009. In addition to military use, the significance of Quanser’s advanced UGV technology may be felt in myriad other applications, from hazardous materials disposal to search-and-rescue operations, to crowd and border patrol.
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