Autonomy keeps vehicles moving when communications fail

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:38:27

   A lot of people say that they can do autonomous things and people think about uncrewed ground vehicles. People talk about UGVs all the time in Ukraine versus autonomous vehicles. So what are the differences between these things, right? So remote control basically means you have a controller like in your hand and you're looking at the thing and you're driving it so think about like a toy car right like that's that's a remote control vehicle now that's fine except you have to you have to actually look at the terrain yourself look at the vehicle and determine where it's going to go that obviously doesn't work beyond line of sight or in areas where you can't see the terrain very well so the next sort of evolution of this is teleoperation and people talk about teleoperation a lot with ground vehicles.

2. 1:39:11

   This is basically where you take a remote control and you look through the vehicle's own sensors, whether it's like camera or thermal sensors, and then you drive the vehicle based on that sensory feedback that you're getting over a network. So you can go beyond line of sight because you just see what the vehicle sees. You don't have to see the vehicle itself. So you can teleoperate something from like across the world if you have a really good connection to that vehicle, if you have a good satellite connection or radio connection to the vehicle.

3. 1:39:43

   And a lot of the work which is being done in Ukraine is teleoperated, uncrewed ground vehicles, where you'll actually have a set of people, like up to five people, who are controlling each vehicle and essentially driving it through the terrain using, you know, like a handheld controller. Or, you know, they're looking through potentially either the vehicle's cameras or the cameras from a drone overhead, and they're just trying to drive this thing around.

4. 1:40:08

   The thing which is hard about that is that, you know, it occupies at least one person's attention at all times because the person's making all of those decisions. But it also is something where if your comms gets disrupted, the thing's just dead, right? Like it requires a human to drive it and the human can no longer connect to it. So one of the strategies is you cut the comms to the vehicle, you use EW or whatever to cut the comms, and then you strike it because it's just a sitting duck.

5. 1:40:41

   So autonomy is extremely powerful because it allows the vehicle to sense the environment, represent it, plan through the environment, all on board, like at the edge, makes its own decisions. and it doesn't require a human to essentially drive it. So when you have an autonomous vehicle, you can tell it where you want it to go and it will just go there. And that means that you can focus your attention on something else.

6. 1:41:10

   That might be another autonomous vehicle. It might be another task. So, for example, you can send a vehicle back to resupply you, but you don't have to be focused anymore. You can do your job. The second thing about autonomy, which is important to understand, is because the vehicle is making decisions based on its own sensing and own onboard compute, if your comms get cut, the thing's going to keep going and, you know, continue the mission.

7. 1:41:38

   And so one of the things we're starting to see out of the Russian-Ukraine conflict is that the Russians are starting to add autonomy to ground vehicles to deal with the contested comms situation. Because it's so hard for them to maintain comms, autonomy allows the vehicles to continue to move without human oversight. So that's another piece of this. so we think about this as kind of force multiplication and resilience to a contested comms environment well now so another thing with autonomy too correct me if i'm wrong is