<title>Role of robotics in ground combat of the future: UGCV, PreceptOR, and FCS</title>

摘要

As a study in late 1999, and subsequently as an official program in early 2000, the Army and DARPA agreed to jointly fund a research effort which became known as Future Combat Systems (FCS) to fast track the introduction of new capability to our ground forces which were increasingly being asked to respond rapidly to hostile situations around the world. The Chief of Staff of the Army clearly articulated this crucial need in his thrust to make the light forces more lethal and the heavy forces more deployable. The DARPA/Army agreement consisted of two parts: a) program to have industry lead teams develop concepts for how the FCS would be composed and integrated and b) a series of technology development programs which were expected to generate potentially radical improvements in the overall effectiveness of the FCS concept. Two of these technology development programs were directly related to ground vehicle robotics, and evolved by the end of 2000 to be the Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle (UGCV) and Perception for Off-road Robotics (PerceptOR) programs. These programs and the underlying assumptions are described in this paper.