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RAPID CITY, S.D. (Jan. 25, 2013) – The South Dakota School of Mines & Technology has added a major military-grade unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to its rapidly-expanding autonomous robotics program, thanks to a donation from Utah State University (USU).
Developed by USU and employed in a variety of capacities, from military scout missions to remote surveillance and sensor deployment, autonomous unmanned ground vehicles are a critical component of U.S. Army infrastructure. The donation was given to the electrical and computer engineering department controls lab, where it will be housed, under the direction of Charles Tolle, Ph.D., professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a USU alumnus.
Built in the late 1990s, the UGV was originally designed for scout work within military field operations. However, with the emergence of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) throughout field operations, the vehicle was repurposed by the military and reengineered by USU to work with smaller inspection vehicles that detect IEDs at check points and U.S. government installations and patrol parking areas for bombs. Today, unmanned ground vehicles sport a variety of applications, including transporting, surveying, deploying and refueling other robots; detecting mines; surveying forest fires; carrying food and provisions to military encampments; and autonomous farming operations.
Donated by USU after its Center of Excellence closed, the $250,000 unmanned ground vehicle, named the T2e, boasts USU’s “smart wheels” technology, in which processors independently control both the speed and direction of each wheel. When applied to the T2e, the result is an omni-directional vehicle. Tolle explains the vehicle’s impressive capabilities, “With this robot’s wheels and their ability to turn 360 degrees, it can literally slide left or spin on a dime.”
The vehicle’s guidance system boasts noteworthy credentials of its own. Far more advanced than most of the robots in the field today, the system shifts focus from simply arriving at a destination, by following a highly specified path along its journey, to driving within a corridor. In other words, the vehicle drives in its own lane rather than requiring a designated set of waypoints along its path.
A member of USU’s Omni-Direction Inspection System family of unmanned ground vehicles, this donation offers Mines professors and students alike access to a top-of-the-line, field-tested UGV for advanced autonomous guidance and cooperative robot research.
The UGV is part of a larger equipment donation that includes spare parts and an autonomous wheel chair from USU’s Center for Self-Organizing and Intelligent Systems, part of its electrical and computer engineering department.