The Resilience Barriers of Automated Ground Vehicles from Military Perspectives

In the case of autonomous and semi-autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), the military application of these systems is becoming more evident and is expected to play an increasingly important role in the future. This paper aims to present and analyse the military applicability and resilience of currently available autonomous ground vehicle perception and control systems. It is important to underline that the paper, after a comprehensive literature review and a presentation of the currently applied methods, attempts to provide a methodological classification of these complex vehicle platforms from the resilience perspective. The methodological classification is based on observations from both economic and engineering perspectives as a result of the systematic review. Furthermore, possible results of resilience are also discussed: survivability, supportability, agility and reusability of the analysed autonomous ground vehicle systems. All these factors can be significant from the point of view of sustainability. As UGVs used under challenging conditions get damaged or outdated, they tend to be dismissed without reusing expensive components, thus generating additional waste. UGVs designed with resilience in mind could be kept in service for a longer period, or their components could be reused more successfully, which supports sustainability. Based on findings there are not yet widely adopted estimation methods to measure the long-term resilience of autonomous military ground vehicles. Thus, a possible theoretical solution for system-autonomy resilience quantification was discussed relying on sensory components and perception methods extracted from the literature as input variables.