Rheinmetall Canada Mission Master medevac | In operation (October/November 2022) – which has since broken autonomous land-speed records across the USA and Europe to create technology transferrable to autonomous commercial road vehicles. “So, 20 kph was an ideal maximum for the Mission Master – not too slow for getting casualties to safety, and not so fast that it ever came close to making an error or failing to modulate its speed for worsening driving conditions. That was especially well trialled with the SP, which the USMC preferred for varying reasons,” Tremblay says. “It also limited the degree of braking needed if the SP encountered something it couldn’t negotiate, like a huge anti-tank ditch. But, if we were running the XT or CXT, or something like a Polaris MRZR, a 4x4 military all-terrain vehicle (ATV), with no casualties onboard, we could go up to 50 kph off-road autonomously without too much difficulty.” Simulating environments Preparations for the operations in Australia and Estonia included visiting the environments to simulate them in synthetic situations, and designing profiles for the UGVs to run in the test tracks shared by Rheinmetall Canada and Rheinmetall Provectus Robotic Solutions; the latter is a Canada-based company last featured in issue 37 (April/May 2021), which was since acquired by Rheinmetall Canada for its capabilities in data-fusion that it developed for the autonomous driving market. “If the right testing conditions aren’t available on our test tracks, we have plenty of wilderness space in Canada to use as real-world testing grounds, once the software testing is done in the lab and we want to see how it performs,” Diniz says. “As well as Rheinmetall Provectus having a very good simulation software suite, we developed in 2023 a very good hardware-in-the-loop simulator, which consists of an A-kit computer in a Pelican case running Rheinmetall Provectus’ algorithms as if it were in a vehicle. “Connected to that is one of UXV Technologies’ tablets with Rheinmetall’s C2 software, through which we can program an autonomous route and take control of a payload, all within a synthetic environment, so that, for instance, the Lidar will still detect obstacles, which the simulated vehicle needs to take navigation and avoidance decisions around.” Tremblay adds that today’s Western defence clients want to holistically integrate all their assets across air, land and sea, uncrewed or otherwise, into whatever battle-management software they are using, “so our UGVs can’t be The trials in Estonia were also aimed at testing the UGVs’ autonomous navigation capabilities in forested locations Is your job search lacking focus? Frustrated at looking for autonomous and robotics related engineering vacancies on generic job boards? Visit www.uncrewedengineeringjobs.com for a clearer view of what’s on offer.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjI2Mzk4