Unmanned Ground Vehicles

Happy Friday everyone! Welcome to the Autonomous Platforms of the Future Newsletter, designed to inform you about future game changing products, technologies, and platforms. This week I'll be focusing on highlighting Autonomous Land Platforms beyond self driving cars.

Unmanned ground vehicles have been in existence for much longer than people remember. Self driving cars are just the new wave of autonomous land vehicles that are shaping the urban city 2.0 landscape but there are an extensive amount of capabilities and use cases that these vehicles are accomplishing everyday. We will explore all the possibilities that are being fulfilled as technology rapidly advances. I'm excited to provide you a different perspective and level of understanding of what is truly possible from autonomous land platforms.

For this newsletter, I will be highlighting other unmanned ground vehicles not used commercially like self driving vehicles. There's enormous use cases for these type of vehicles both commercially and defense related.

To start, let's define unmanned ground vehicles. Simply put, they are:

Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) - a vehicle that operates while in contact with the ground and without an onboard human presence.

UGVs are used mostly when its inconvenient or dangerous for humans to interact within a situation and complete a lot of the mundane, dirty activities.

Since these vehicles cover multiple industries, there are several potential applications. I've identified several industries and common use cases below:

Types of Industries

• Space

• Civilian and Commercial

  • Agriculture

  • Manufacturing

  • Mining

  • Supply Chain

• Emergency Response

• Miltary

• Naval Operations

• Peacekeeping Operations

• Construction

Types of Use Cases

• Exploration missions

• Rescue and Recovery missions

• Ground surveillance

• Urban street presence

• Marine Corps combat

• Logistics

• Target acquisition

• Reconnaissance

• Traverse maps

• Transport

• Disarm bombs

• Decoy

One recent major government funded programs is called OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET). This program is currently a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded program since 2016 aimed to demonstrate swarming autonomous technologies in a urban environment.

DARPA envisions future small-unit infantry forces using swarms comprising upwards of 250 small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and/or small unmanned ground systems (UGSs) to accomplish diverse missions in complex urban environments. By leveraging and combining emerging technologies in swarm autonomy and human-swarm teaming, the program seeks to enable rapid development and deployment of breakthrough capabilities.

In this section, I'll focus on the Army's budget outlook for autonomous platforms. Here's a quick snapshot of the FY24 funding proposals versus the 2023 received funding.

The world beyond self driving cars is vast and every changing depending on capabilities evolving or sheer need for new technology. As I stated in a previous newsletter, the focus for researchers and scientists is on identifying habitable planets outside of Earth. I see unmanned ground vehicles playing a huge part in that discovery since humans won't be the first to explore these terrains based off the safety concerns alone.

How companies and startups position themselves to be part of the new technology regime focused on autonomy should be something to witness. I'm excited for what the future will bring humanity with new autonomous platforms.

Thanks for joining me this week. Stay tuned for my next technology talk by subscribing below and sharing with colleagues you think it would benefit.

If you'd like to collaborate with me on future technology opportunities, use my calendly link to book a time. Hope you have a great rest of your week