A small car can’t pull a heavy trailer. Sports utility vehicles don’t have a compact car’s fuel efficiency. an ideal, one-size-fits-all vehicle doesn’t exist. The identical goes for unmanned ground vehicles, referred to as UGVs.

Soldiers use UGVs — resembling the 40-pound PackBot or the bigger, 115-pound TALON — to detect and defeat roadside bombs, gain situational awareness, detect chemical and radiological agents, and increase the standoff distance between Soldiers and potentially dangerous situations. Just as SUVs offer utility smaller cars can’t match, larger UGVs provide capabilities not available with smaller platforms.

The 300-pound iRobot Warrior, developed in partnership with the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command’s tank and automotive center, is a huge UGV that gives more lifting and carrying power, in addition to the possibility of better dexterity to seize items or open and shut doors.

The Warrior’s capabilities combine that of a Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center-developed map-based navigation and people of the Warrior’s predecessor, the Neomover, which was larger than a PackBot and will perform several dexterous tasks with its robotic arm.

WARRIOR HOLDS UP IN EXERCISES

The development team evaluated Warrior UGVs in numerous live exercises and a genuine-life disaster response. In February 2009, TARDEC brought the Warrior to the Cobra Gold tactical exercises in Thailand for an assessment on the Marine Experimentation Center.

“A group of Marines were section of the exercise and so they tested the system’s mobility, communication-range capabilities, how well can it go up and down stairs and thru corridors and hallways,” said Jeremy Gray, TARDEC Ground Vehicle Robotics research electrical engineer.

At the exercise, the military tested the Warrior with several infantry mission scenarios including: entry-point checkpoint, vehicle security, building clearance, cordon and search, route clearance, assess mobility and casualty extractions. The Cobra Gold evaluations were vital in helping TARDEC associates determine the way to move forward with the platform’s development.

“We learned that the systems needed some improvements before shall we get them to a fieldable maturity level,” said TARDEC GVR Customer service Team Leader Lonnie Freiburger. “There were some good data points that showed that if we continued to make S&T investment in mission payloads — comparable to manipulators, platform intelligence, power, vision and explosive and chemical detection systems — shall we have a wiser product.”

The iRobot 710 Warrior with APOBS provides warfighters with a resounding and rugged unmanned system that facilitates the deliberate breaching of anti-personnel minefields and multi-strand wire obstacles.

Shortly after that analysis, TARDEC received congressional funding to work with iRobot within the development of 2 Warrior manipulator arms in July 2009. The arms were required to weigh lower than 45 kilograms, have a reach of one.5 meters, lift a 50 kilogram object and move it 50 meters, drag a 100 kilogram object for fifty meters, dig 25 centimeters into the soil, and switch over a 50 centimeter by 50 centimeter x 4 centimeters piece of concrete. iRobot eventually doubled the lift capacity and extended the reach to at least one.9 meters, increasing the burden to 54 kilograms.

iRobot also developed a mechanism attaching an Anti-Personnel Obstacle Breaching System, or APOBS, to the Warrior to teleoperate it into position and remotely fire the munition. The APOBS has two boxes with a line charge with grenades attached at intervals. An attached rocket is shot to put out the road. The grenades at the line then detonate and clear a path for users.

The APOBS is a fielded system, but must currently be installed place manually. Brought on by that, adding it to the Warrior or other tele-operated UGVs meant having to begin from scratch.

“Trying to take a system that was designed for that and adapt it and integrate it to a UGV was an excellent challenge since the technical reports and coaching manuals don’t have helpful information,” Gray said. “We had loads of questions [concerning the APOBS integration] and asked the developers that made the learning manuals, and so they weren’t even sure. So it was a large number of: ‘Let’s see if this works.’ Luckily, we got through all of it without blowing up the robot. It ended up being successful. We had a number of close calls, but we learned rather a lot from that.”

EXPANDING CAPABILITIES

After those refinements were made, the team put Warrior to the test again. The congressional funding also allowed them to run more drills on the Navy’s China Lake, Calif., facility in November 2009, after which twice on the combined-arms live-fire exercise during 2010 Cobra Gold, outside of Chai Badan, Thailand.

“It is an exceedingly big show. That’s if you have air and ground forces coming together from different countries. It’s basically one big exercise of 1 big assault. So that you had air strikes and mortar rounds getting into a space,” Gray said. “The ground forces used the APOBS for the initial penetration, so the Warrior went as much as the concertina wire, launched and blew that out of how after which the bottom forces were capable of go in and complete the exercise.”

Currently, one among TARDEC’s Warriors is undergoing final software testing. The alternative is at Re2′s facility supporting two small business initiatives TARDEC manages on semi-autonomous door opening and enhanced manipulation feedback. Also they are getting used to support Gray’s innovation project in developing a brand new gripper design.

“Re2 is developing an enhanced intuitive control,” Gray noted “A lot of the manipulators don’t have real fine movement, and that they don’t have haptic feedback, that is one of those feedback that goes back to the users so that they have an concept of what’s occurring.”

In that light, Re2 is building an end-effector tool kit for the Warrior arm with automatic tool- change capabilities.

“On the tip of your arm, there’s some type of tool — whether it’s a gripper, whether it’s a knife — that they’ve the facility to alter out automatically,” Gray explained.

In marsupial mode, the iRobot 710 Warrior carries a PackBot to approach, investigate and neutralize improvised explosive devices, while keeping personnel at a secure standoff distance.

An assessment using the Warrior manipulator arm and the Re2 Modular Intelligent Manipulation and Intuitive Control was completed in December 2011 at Camp Pendleton, Calif., Scenarios involved opening doors, getting through locked doors and finding a locked device. The tasks were also done with smaller UGVs without the tool-change capabilities.

Engineers took a distinct option to gather information with regards to what tools to design for the system.

“We went out to Fallujah, Iraq, after we deployed and took photos of all of the tools being strapped onto the robots. This is often the ad-hoc stuff that the user is putting on,” Freiburger said.

It is smart to have conformed hardware designs rather than the makeshift tools added within the field.

“It appears like there’s a possibility to leverage what industry is doing, but industry is just a little different. They’re more interested in very precise tasks in a benign environment. We’re facing very complex environments. Our tolerances are slightly more open than what they must handle.”

Tools currently being designed include:

• end effectors — grippers — for various type of doors
• engineering tools for route clearance, diggers and trenchers
• small pneumatic sledgehammers which can pick during the ground
• wire rakes to tug command wire from the ground
• window breakers to do entry control point form of jobs

REAL-LIFE DISASTER TESTING

In addition to the California and Thailand exercises, iRobot sent two PackBots and two Warriors to Japan after the March 2011 magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that left around 19,000 people dead or missing and damaged several nuclear reactors to the purpose of near failure.

The PackBots were first sent right into a reactor to realize situational awareness, where the investigation found radiation levels of 72.0 Sieverts contained in the reactor’s containment vessel — enough to kill someone in minutes.

Tim Trainer, interim general manager of iRobot’s Military Business Unit, said the UGVs stood up well to the conditions.

“We knew going into the operation that Warrior was an extraordinarily rugged platform, but we didn’t know the way much of an effect the high radiation levels would have at the robot operationally,” Trainer said. “We’re pleased that Warrior has continued to accomplish unaffected on this environment.”

Workers also outfitted the platform with an industrial vacuum cleaner to take away radioactive debris and extra reduce radiation levels.

THE RIGHT MACHINE FOR THE JOB

Moving ahead, the challenge is building the correct size robot for the job.

“There isn’t an ideal robot,” Gray said. “Eventually, you’re going to have an arsenal of robots, and you’re going to select the only that’s going to assist your mission the most effective day by day.”

Today, Soldiers primarily tele-operate robots.

“There are some intelligent features that vendors are selling together with scripts for movements, akin to manipulation. Maybe it’s essential reposition an arm before it’ll go upstairs. You push a button and the middle of gravity is recalibrated from the manipulator for all of the payloads and you can now climb up the steps. Maybe you will have a user that’s continually picking up objects so now you could have a script for that task,” Freiburger said. “We know we wish to reduce the cognitive load of our warfighters and at last be a force multiplier.”

For now, engineers are engaged on augmented teleoperation to enhance the operational tempo by any means possible, and continue the hunt for improved autonomy and dexterity.

“A robot is an enabler,” Freiburger said. “We’re constantly engaged on improving the touch, senses, and alternative ways of communicating and understanding our surroundings. [We’re] attempting to make the robots more like humans whatsoever possible.”

ABOUT TARDEC
TARDEC is a part of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, which has the mission to develop technology and engineering solutions for America’s Soldiers.

RDECOM is a big subordinate command of the U.S. Army Materiel Command. AMC is the Army’s premier provider of materiel readiness — technology, acquisition support, materiel development, logistics power projection, and sustainment — to the full force, around the spectrum of joint military operations. If a Soldier shoots it, drives it, flies it, wears it, eats it or communicates with it, AMC provides it.