Road Warrior

Quanser's unmanned ground vehicle could save lives in combat zones using haptics

by Andre Voshart | May 10, 2008

Quanser’s unmanned ground vehicle team members - (from left) R&D engineer Don Gardener; senior project manager Andrew Dawes (holding the vehicle's linear current amplifier); and R&D engineer Mahyar Fotoohi - gather in front of the prototype.

Quanser’s unmanned ground vehicle could save lives in combat zones using haptics

Crude bombs known as IEDs (improvised explosive devices), a fact of life in today’s “war on terror,” have forced the Canadian military in Afghanistan and beyond to explore new ways to cope. At home, one Canadian company has been tasked to create new technology that will allow soldiers to detect, manipulate and eliminate them—all from the safety of their convoys thousands of yards away.

Markham, Ont.-based Quanser Consulting, a company specializing in state-of-the-art robotics and control systems, has received assistance from the National Research Council Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program to create a prototype for a high-speed unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), which will give military convoys a sensory edge as they make their way across unexplored territory.

“The ultimate intent is to be able to drive an unmanned ground vehicle, and with a controller remotely, be able to get some sort of sensation,” says Quanser CEO Paul Gilbert. “The theory and concept is that if you can feel the bumps in the road and so on you’ll be able to drive the vehicle quicker.” The UGV will incorporate the company’s own haptic innovations, which deal with the sense of touch for controlling virtual objects with vibro-tactile and force feedback.

In all, the user would have a steering device at their ground station, visual communication, and sensory feedback—but exactly how it’s delivered is under wraps.

“The device that we’re developing, I can’t talk too much about that because we’re planning to patent that design, but suffice it to say it’s a novel advanced-joystick kind of arrangement,” Gilbert says carefully. “It has throttling capabilities and directional capabilities so you can turn left and right and accelerate and decelerate, but the object is that user will get some pretty good feedback from the vehicle.”

Current UGVs are slow, and he says they typically run six to eight kilometres per hour. Quanser’s goal is to raise that by as much as they can since slow UGVs make bomb disposal teams easy targets for ambush and often result in accidental flip-overs when users attempt to operate the vehicles at higher speeds.

As for the communication side of things, senior project manager Andrew Dawes says the challenges creating a fully haptic-enabled remote vehicle are substantial. “We’ll have a base station PC, where the operator will sit and that’s where we’ll have the visual cues and haptic feedback, that will communicate via wireless link to the remote vehicle,” he says. “Part of the issue there is the delays in the wireless transmission and making sure that’s robust and reliable. We can’t have failures, and if the delays are too large it causes problems with the haptic feedback.”

According to Gilbert, accurate haptic control requires a closed loop rate of 1,000 Hz. This means the machine and the user must be able to communicate with input and output information at a minimum of 1,000 times per second.

Quanser’s UGV development began in January 2008 after getting $400,000 in funding from NRC-IRAP. Development will continue throughout the year and a prototype is expected by the fall, with the aim of producing fully deployable units by early 2009. The significance of this technology may be felt in other applications, from hazardous materials disposal to search-and-rescue operations.
www.quanser.com