<title>Real-time target acquisition for the Army's scout mission</title>

Abstract

We have developed a robotic unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that performs reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition. THis vehicle has been used in a number of tactical training exercises at Fort Hood, TX with US Army scouts from the 1st Armored Cavalry Division. The UGV, built around a high- mobility, multi-purpose, wheeled vehicle, is designed to be supervised by an operator at a control station located 10 km or more away from the UGV. The UGV's real-time automatic target acquisition system uses an infrared sensor to automatically detect and track moving ground vehicles out to a range of 5 km. When commanded by the operator, the UGV will engage a particular target with a laser designator. The ATA system is the topic of this paper. We describe the requirements of the ATA system, the algorithms used, their implementation, and the system's performance.