Robot wars

This summer 14 teams of engineers drawn from UK industry and academia will load their vans, travel to a quiet corner of the Wiltshire countryside, and engage in a series of robotic exercises that will shatter the peace of the surrounding livestock.

The MoD Grand Challenge— which will take place in August at Copehill Down, a mock village built during the Cold War — is the latest effort to stimulate the development and use of the kind of autonomous robotic systems expected to revolutionise the battlefield of the future.

The competition is more subtle than its US forebear, the DARPA Grand Challenge, which, after three rounds over six years, is now bearing fruit in the form of reliable robotic vehicle technologies. In contrast, the UK competition runs for just 13 months and the robots must multi-task to acquire sufficient data so that their control station can identify four different threats — some of which are nigh-on impossible for even experienced soldiers under certain conditions. The teams involved in the competition, have to create semi-autonomous robots that can find a sniper, an improvised explosive device (IED), a 4 x 4 vehicle with a gun on it and a group dressed in semi-military uniform carrying arms, and get the information back to a two-man forward control station.

To win the challenge trophy and the opportunity for lucrative MoD contracts, the teams must integrate their autonomous mobile platform with a suite of sensors and data retrieval and analysis techniques.

For the MoD the competition is a different approach. ‘It’s a new business model for us and it won’t be the last of the new initiatives we will follow to engage with industry, SMEs, academics and schools to promote the requirements and needs of the MoD,’ said Andy Wallace, leader of the Grand Challenge programme.

‘We want to tap into innovations that maybe we haven’t in the past so we observed DARPA’s competition and have adapted it to what we and our people on operations need. We were conscious that we want to provide a depth to the challenge and we’re under no illusion that it’s difficult,’ said Wallace.

‘We might be asking too much of the teams, but we aren’t expecting them to start with a clean sheet. We are looking for technologies that are partially mature and would be integrated on a platform to make a solution. We’re keeping up to speed with the teams and the sorts of technologies they’re working on to see if they are capable of finding the threats. but we won’t know until the final how good they are,’ he added.