80 As we have often heard over the years, it makes little sense for car makers to boast of a new model having the most powerful engine ever, or any other singular parameter or achievement, if they have forgotten to make the components work together at the system level. Without that holistic system engineering, it cannot be expected that the car will be optimised to tackle its purpose well, whether that be ferrying children or shopping bags, or performing at test tracks and on autobahns. With UGVs, holistically suiting the vehicle – and its ancillaries – to purpose is even more critical, given that, unlike cars, UGVs must drive themselves and potentially execute a number of more complicated tasks still. They must increasingly also handle very different environments to public roads, with unique hazards that push mechanics, powertrains and autonomy to their limits. Fortunately, when one looks across the field of UGV solutions today, one can mark a number of ways that these autonomous terrestrial systems and their components (internal and remote alike) are being optimised to better suit the risk case, range requirements, cost profiles and more that end-users truly need, for widespread adoption of UGVs to become a reality. A selection of such cases is presented here. Firefighting There is a strong argument to be made that firefighting is the hardest application to engineer UGVs for, owing to strictness of regulations on safety and liability (for obvious reasons) that must be complied to. Such is the severity of these standards on autonomy, that most UGVs aimed at firefighting services are, in fact, entirely remotely-operated systems, forbidden from operating with any notable degree of autonomous behaviours. Nonetheless, the capacity of uncrewed systems to save firefighters’ lives – by, for instance, entering burning buildings or areas before they do, to ascertain how safe or unsafe it is first, or initiate fire control tactics before human firefighters step in – cannot be ignored. For such reasons, Alpha Robotics is developing an autonomous version of its Wolf R1 UGV. The Wolf is a 900 kg max weight vehicle measuring 1500 x 1200 x 1300 mm and running on dual tracked treads, with two 7.5 kW axial-flux electric motors providing up to 1050 Nm of torque each, its energy coming from a 9.4 kWh battery pack enabling eight hours of endurance as standard. As Philipp Hartke, authorised officer at Alpha Robotics tells us, “If it carries too much equipment that might fall to six hours, though we’ve seen it operate up to 12 hours when it’s not carrying so much – but for its intelligent perception, we’re integrating a Lidar system and stereo cameras for realtime 3D mapping about the robot, so that it will be able to drive autonomously into buildings and different areas. “It already has sufficient drive-by-wire systems installed; with sensors and autonomy software added, it will be able to efficiently operate by itself, or assist Doing a job well means having the right build and equipment for it. Rory Jackson investigates how UGVs are being right-sized and optimised for a range of applications April/May 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology To the task at hand
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