A few years back I had the opportunity of going to the DARPA Grand Challenge, perhaps you have heard of this? They took robotic unmanned vehicles, which rolled by them selves through the desert from start to finish some to 200-miles. I was quite fascinated by the technology in the advances that mankind had made in the field of autonomous ground vehicles.Yet, at the same time I could see there were inherent problems with these vehicles in negotiating obstacles. You see the vehicles were often set to drive down the road that lets a 35 mph and avoid rocks, cactuses, and ditches. Some of the very intelligent robotic programmers had he cited to make dual mode features, which allowed the vehicle to drive at high speed win all in a straight path and then slow down to negotiate obstacles.

That makes a lot of sense.Now then, with unmanned aerial vehicles that to surveillance for the military, generally they will be flying straight and level. But what happens when an enemy shoots a surface to air missile at it and it must avoid that missile? Well, why not do what the programmers did with the unmanned ground vehicles with a dual mode.

This way, the unmanned aerial vehicle could concentrate specifically on the threat to destroy it and then it once the threat was eliminated it would return to normal flight and go back to the other mode. This also makes a lot of sense.Let us also take a convoy of vehicles all driving autonomously and the first lead vehicle comes across an obstacle that it must avoid. At this point it needs to switch all the vehicles behind it also into the second mode.

The second mode would be slow down to 10 mph or even five mph and watch for obstacles. This way all the other sensors on the vehicle to use a tighter parameter of information gathering and more adjustments per second then if they were going 35 mph. This would prevent the vehicles in the back from crashing into the vehicles in the front.When considering autonomous aerial vehicles flying in formation and one receives a threat then it must seek evasive action.

But if all the unmanned aerial vehicles take evasive action at the same time you are liable to have several midair collisions even if the surface to air missile misses. Consider all this in 2006.

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By: Lance Winslow