Autonomous vehicle for surveillance missions in off-road environment

The use of drones is nowadays an extended procedure in the surveillance and combat missions in the armies of the different NATO countries. The concept of drone is a generalization of the so called unmanned vehicles, whose more usual unit is the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). However, in recent years the civil autonomous vehicles technology has been extended to military sector that demands autonomous technology to carry out missions in the ground with the so called Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV). These vehicles develop missions in unstructured environments, usually off-road, and must be able of combining autonomous behaviors plus tele-operation from a command station. In this paper we present the application of the civil autonomous vehicle technology to develop a demonstrator of UGV for the Spanish Army, including the background, architecture and first field tests.