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46 Insight | UGVs be kept on a leash. That makes a survey particularly perilous and slow for the dog handler when searching among IED- infested rubble.   Once found, clearing the explosive can be a challenge. If an unexploded bomb is hidden in rubble, the rubble must be cleared before the mine can be accessed or even identified. Clearing the rubble can be achieved with construction machines, but using such heavy equipment potentially over explosives is very risky for the operator. The Digger Management and Operating Environment (DOME) system addresses these two main challenges through robotics. The mine-sniffer dogs are equipped with a mine detection dog harness, called Smart System, that has a GPS tracker, a camera and a loudspeaker. This allows the dog’s handler to map precisely the location of explosives. The D-250 is then deployed by remote control using cameras, controllers and virtual reality goggles. It uses an ultra-high precision GPS with an accuracy of under 2 cm, digging depth control sensors and a flow- reversal cooling system for self-cleaning of air intake grids. The nominal range of the remote control is 500 m, but it can be extended to more than 10 km with the camera and GPS option. Driverless cars Chip and system supplier Nvidia has signed key technology deals for the development of driverless vehicles. Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia says, “With long-time partner Audi, we have announced that we will achieve Level 4 autonomous driving in production cars no later than 2020.” By comparison, Level 5 is full autonomy. Vehicles from Mercedes-Benz will incorporate products built with Nvidia technology this year, and Bosch and ZF – the number one and number five Tier One auto suppliers respectively – have adopted Nvidia’s Drive PX car computer. Nvidia has also launched its latest graphics processing unit for autonomous systems, called Xavier. This uses a new GPU architecture called Volta, a custom eight-core CPU based around its Denver ARM-based architecture, and a new computer vision accelerator. The processor will deliver 20 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of performance, while consuming only 20 W of power. It is also designed to be compliant with critical automotive standards such as the ISO 26262 functional safety specification. “Xavier runs a new operating system, DriveWorks, that takes in data from multiple sensors, fuses it, localises the February/March 2017 | Unmanned Systems Technology The Digger bomb disposal system is being used with dogs to detect mines in rubble in urban areas (Courtesy of The Digger Foundation) Swiss research lab Rinspeed is exploring different ways of designing driverless cars (Courtesy of Rinspeed