Transport & logistics In the driving seat
Automation is hardly a new technology in terms of military logistics, being used in some form or other for the past 60 years or so. However, ongoing advances in this area offer the potential to revolutionise logistics, and armed forces in the West are looking into how best to implement these systems –
particularly when it comes to supply trucks. Gordon Feller speaks to Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute; Sagie Evbenata, senior research analyst at Guidehouse; retired Major General Simon Hutchings OBE, master general of logistics with the Royal Logistics Corps; and Michael P Noonan, senior fellow at the US-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, to learn more.
he hunger for automated vehicles (AVs) – by the civilian and military sectors alike – has been a constant for decades. One expert, Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a US-based think- tank, has looked back at the ways in which AVs have been a goal of automobile manufacturers for decades. However, they “have failed to reach maturity due to the inherent complexity of passenger driving conditions, which span everything from well-defined highways to chaotic urban streets and unmarked country roads. “Driver-assist technologies, however,” Clark adds, “have made dramatic improvements in vehicle safety, essentially breaking down the automated driving mission into a set of discrete tasks that are assigned to the vehicle or the driver depending on who is best suited. Managing speed, direction and lane alignment are tasks automation does well. Making decisions on whether to leave a standing stop or turn are often best left to the driver, as some well-publicised accidents showed over the past several years.” The US Department of Defense (DoD) and allied governments, both inside and outside Nato, are focused on procuring
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‘human-in-the-loop’ and ‘leader-follower’ type automation systems – the former requires people to be involved in an automated system’s decision-making process, while the latter sees a human-driven vehicle followed by an autonomous vehicle at a set distance. The advantage of this is that development and evolution of commercial truck automation is proceeding rapidly, due in part to the infusion of massive venture-capital financing over the past six years. Within the DoD, many in the top brass see the importance of moving forward with deployment of human-in-the-loop or leader- follower automation in order to bring automation more rapidly to key parts of military operations, including military supply convoys as well as various types of combat convoy applications. Expanded deployment of automated convoy or leader-
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Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
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