UVS Technology Issues

Abstract

The aspirational capability objectives for UVS in the air, land and maritime environments articulated by several national roadmap documents (e.g. [202] [205] [206] [267] [268] [278] [281]) may effectively be expressed as: 2008-10 conduct of ISR missions; 2015-2020 autonomous patrol; and, 2025-2030 strike capability and combat missions. This implies a need for persistent UVS autonomy in complex dynamic military environments and the automation of a range of higher order or ‘intelligent’ functions. As a result, the challenges discussed in this chapter pertain mainly to next-generation UVS and pre-empt any ‘validated’ current military requirements. The chapter focuses on the complexities of contextual decision-making, planning in dynamic environments, verification and validation, sensory deprivation and trust and reliability for autonomous military UVS. It is recognised that there are a large number of other technological challenges that may result in improved UVS, however, these have been covered by a range of other teams in studies cataloguing the state-of-the-art and projected requirements in each of these fields against various likely missions and applications (e.g. [44] [141] [202] [204] [205] [206] [230] [234] [237] [244] [245] [268] [276] [277] [278] [279] [280] [281] [282]).