Ingenious Self-Driving Vehicle Saves Lives by Detecting Roadside Bombs

Oshkosh Defense

Improvised explosive devices, mines, and other kinds of roadside bombs are a major threat to U.S. troops serving overseas. That may be about to change, and not just because we’re pulling out of Afghanistan.

U.S. defense contractor Oshkosh Defense already keeps soldiers away from harm with the M-ATV, an armored vehicle specially designed to resist blasts from IEDs and mines. Even better, it detects explosives using special ground penetrating radar and a 12-wheeled mineroller which attaches to the front of the M-ATV.

But that’s not quite good enough: Oshkosh wants to move soldiers even further from the danger zone by putting them in another vehicle entirely and making the minesweeping truck drive itself. Minesweeping is a “very dangerous job where unmanned ground vehicle technology could have a big payoff in saving lives,” says John Beck, head engineer for Oshkosh’s Unmanned Systems group.

Self-Driving Warriors

The company has spent a decade developing an autonomous driving technology called TerraMax, which can be applied to vehicles already on the road. You may recognize it from Top Gear, where it was installed on Oshkosh’s six-wheeled cargo truck, the MTVR MK25A1. TerraMax came to life in 2004 as a competitor in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a 150-mile race across the California desert designed to spur development of autonomous vehicles. It did well in the great robot race and has since evolved into a more advanced and versatile platform.

It’s now equipped with radar and LIDAR, which uses lasers to detect nearby objects, along with a drive-by-wire system that electronically controls engine speed, transmission, braking, and steering. The system does more than steer and hit the throttle and brakes. It can intelligently control a central tire inflation system and driveline locks to navigate deep sand or mud, all without any input from the operator.

Oshkosh Defense

TerraMax works pretty much like the self-driving cars Google and others are developing for civilian use, adapted for use in much tougher conditions. Google can carefully map roads before its vehicle ever tackles them on its own. The big automakers can make their vehicles recognize lane markings and speed limit signs. Oshkosh doesn’t have those advantages. So it made TerraMax capable of combining overhead imagery from satellites and planes with standard military maps generated through geographic information systems. That lets where soldiers define roads and other obstacles, much like with a commercial GPS system.

Once given a defined course, either through waypoints along a route or with just a final destination, the vehicles can navigate themselves. Operators can set things like vehicle speed and following distance. They have access to a live map of the entire convoy and receive diagnostic reports on vehicles.

These aren’t entirely autonomous vehicles, at least not yet. If they reach an impasse of some kind, they can alert an operator farther back in the convoy and ask what to do. One operator can monitor up to five vehicles, Oshkosh says, a number chosen through warfighter feedback. Even with that limit, TerraMax achieves two objectives. It allows the military to move more cargo with fewer personnel. And it makes a convoy look like it’s carrying more personnel than it really is, which could discourage an enemy from attacking.

Oshkosh’s unmanned vehicle technology is still in testing, but the company has spent the last three years working with the Marine Corp Warfighting Lab and the Office of Naval Research to get it ready for the battlefield. It’s not the only military-grade autonomous technology in development. Lockheed Martin is working on something it calls the Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System, which also allows for autonomous or semi-autonomous operation in a convoy.

Autonomous Minesweeping

TerraMax can be applied to just about anything that drives, though modern vehicles work better because they have more computers to work with. To teach a vehicle to search for roadside bombs instead of simply drive along, Oshkosh just has to change the software.