Crusher, the unmanned ground combat vehicle

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become more prominent and more popular for a variety of military and law-enforcement missions (the latest: the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has budgeted for UAVs to help patrol the U.S.-Mexico border). A more recent addition to the panoply of military and law-enforcement instruments is the unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). UGVs add an important element to any battle-field planning: To protect the lives of soldiers by giving them enhanced stand-off capability to accomplish many missions. This is why the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense (DoD), has launched its Grand Challenge contests. The Grand Challenge is a field test to accelerate research and development in autonomous ground vehicles. The purpose of the Grand Challenge is to bring together individuals and organizations from industry, the R&D community, government, the armed services, academia, students, backyard inventors, and automotive enthusiasts in the pursuit of a technological challenge.

This year’s Grand Challenge moved this battlefield-oriented DARPA program closer to homeland security. Tony Tether, DARPA director, was clear: “We believe the robotics community is ready to tackle vehicle operation inside city limits,” he said.

So here is news from this year Grand Challenge. The National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC), which is part of the Robotics Institute in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, two weeks ago, unveiled the Crusher. Carnegie Mellon vehicles finished a close second and third in the Grand Challenge, confirming Carnegie Mellon’s reputation as a top-notch developer of robotics. Crusher shows what we can expect to see on the battlefield — and on a terrorist stand-off scene in an urban setting — a decade from now. Crusher is a new breed of UGV — an NREC-designed, six-wheeled, all-wheel drive, hybrid electric, skid-steered, unmanned ground vehicle. It is not high on mileage efficiency: It weighs 14,000 pounds fully fueled, and is designed to carry a 3,000-pound payload. At 17,000 pound total weight, two Crusher vehicles can be carried by a single C-130H aircraft and dropped into any region in the world. Once on the ground, Crusher can carry up to 8,000 pounds of payload without compromising its mobility. Note that the 8,000 pounds can be anything — any combination of cargo, armor, armaments, or surveillance equipment. Crusher is designed to withstand extreme terrain, with the ability to take in its stride regular impact with trees, boulders, fences, tree stumps, and ditches at high speed. With six wheel independent drive, Crusher can go up and over almost anything — and, what is more, if in the process it should get upside down, it moves its wheels to the other side of the vehicle and starts all over again. Crusher’s hybrid electric system is silent, using a high-performance SAFT-built lithium ion battery module which delivers power to the six in-wheel UQM traction motors located in the hub drive system of each wheel.