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The AMAS program could cut down on the number of truck drivers needed by the U.S. Army.
to move them and their vital cargo more safely and efficiently. uuu
One major program to develop driverless military convoys is the Autonomous Mobility Appliqué System (AMAS), a Lockheed Martin-U. S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center program, says Joe Zinecker, director of Lockheed Martin’s Combat Maneuver Systems. AMAS is a Joint Capability Technology Demonstrator program in which the U. S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps are working together toward standardizing the AMAS kits so warfighters could transform a wide range of vehicles into optionally manned vehicles. “Currently, one of the greatest threats to our men and women in the field is the roadside bomb,” Bernard Theisen, TARDEC’s AMAS technical manager and ground vehicle robotics engineer, said last year. “This technology would enable us to send an unmanned lead vehicle down these dangerous supply routes and keep our warfighters safe.”
Photo: U.S. Army.
The AMAS appliqué kit consists of the by-wire active safety kit and the autonomy kit. The technology uses GPS, lidar systems, automotive radio detection and ranging, and commercially available automotive sensors.
To date, AMAS has undergone two notable tests. In the first, conducted at Fort Hood, Texas, in January 2014, “three unmanned military trucks negotiated oncoming traffic, followed rules of the road, recognized pedestrians and avoided various obstacles at speeds up to 25 mph in an urban environment,” the Army said on its website. The second driverless line-haul demonstration was conducted May
29, 2015, at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. It focused on seven AMASequipped military trucks traveling at up to 40 mph. Despite these successful demonstrations, currently there are no programs or budgets for fielding autonomous convoys, Zinecker says. “The Army is still developing its strategy for fielding autonomous convoys and has not yet established programs of record, nor has it established budgets.” The Army, under pressure to sharply reduce its manpower while maintaining its combat capabilities, could cut many truck drivers with the advent of AMAS technology, he says. “You probably wouldn’t go down to an utterly unmanned convoy,” Zinecker says. “Right now, in many vehicles, you’ll find two drivers, a driver and an assistant driver. You might be able to reduce that by half. In the most autonomous convoys that are being envisioned, you could imagine maybe a driver or two that are husbanding three or four or five vehicles,” he says. “That might go, let’s say, from 10 drivers to two drivers for five vehicles.” The next step toward fielding robotic convoys is for customers to decide how to use them. “The reality is the Army is still working through and thinking through all the possibilities, how they would affect their operational utilization of the vehicles, how it would affect survivability of the soldier, how it would affect the security of the convoy. But it’s safe to say that the opportunity certainly exists for a reduction of half in the number of drivers and it could be as much as 80 percent,” he says. Zinecker sees two paths forward. One is to further develop AMAS, which he says “could fairly quickly transition into existing vehicles and
provide a substantial reduction in the overall force required to drive a convoy enterprise. ... It could happen, say, in the next three years, perhaps even sooner than that. The other path that AMAS could go though would be to go for further development of more autonomy. We believe the Army should be considering, probably is considering, both of those approaches.” Lockheed Martin and the government are discussing an extended warfighter experiment over six months in 2016 that would operate a convoy of six to eight vehicles of the same type using AMAS. The experiment is designed to test concepts of operations and tactics, techniques and procedures so that the Army “can start establishing not just what does the autonomy do but how does the rest of the Army operate with autonomy.” Toward that end, Army officials have said, TARDEC is working closely with the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, military users, and the acquisition community to advance the development of autonomous appliqué systems for tactical vehicles and make these capabilities available by 2020. This development program is scheduled to be completed in 2016. “The main program that we are working is … autonomous ground resupply,” says Jim Parker, TARDEC’s associate director for ground vehicle robotics. That is the major thrust for us, … provide the capability that TRADOC is asking for, that we will then transition to the PEO [Program Executive Office] for the Combat Support and Combat Service Support for application to the tactical wheeled vehicle fleet.” Another prominent endeavor is TerraMax, an Office of Naval NOVEMBER 2015 | UNMANNED SYSTEMS
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