Increasing the Trafficability of Unmanned Ground Vehicles through Intelligent Morphing Siddharth Odedra 1, Dr Stephen Prior 1, Dr Mehmet Karamanoglu 1, Dr Siu-Tsen Shen 2 1Product Design and Engineering, Middlesex University Trent Park Campus, Bramley Road, London N14 4YZ, U.K.
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] 2Department of Multimedia Design, National Formosa University 64 Wen-Hua Road, Hu-Wei 63208, YunLin County, Taiwan R.O.C.
[email protected] Abstract Unmanned systems are used where humans are either 2. UNMANNED GROUND VEHICLES unable or unwilling to operate, but only if they can perform as Unmanned Ground Vehicles can be defined as good as, if not better than us. Systems must become more mechanised systems that operate on ground surfaces and autonomous so that they can operate without assistance, relieving the burden of controlling and monitoring them, and to do that they serve as an extension of human capabilities in unreachable need to be more intelligent and highly capable. In terms of ground or unsafe areas. They are used for many things such as vehicles, their primary objective is to be able to travel from A to B cleaning, transportation, security, exploration, rescue and where the systems success or failure is determined by its mobility, bomb disposal. UGV’s come in many different for which terrain is the key element. This paper explores the configurations usually defined by the task at hand and the concept of creating a more autonomous system by making it more environment they must operate in, and are either remotely perceptive about the terrain, and with reconfigurable elements, controlled by the user, pre-programmed to carry out specific making it more capable of traversing it.