Attaining Operational Survivability in an Autonomous Unmanned Ground Surveillance Vehicle

An architectural framework for the development of autonomous unmanned systems capable of exhibiting persistence and endurance when confronted with unexpected scenarios is presented in this paper. This framework incorporates the concept of survivability as an embodied characteristic of autonomous unmanned systems. This biologically-inspired approach models the operational and survival requirements of an autonomous system as a set of needs which dictates the system's behaviour. It is the capacity of a system to fulfil these needs that contributes to its survival, as is the case with living creatures. Within this context, survivability emerges from the process of determining the behaviour, or sequence of behaviours that maximizes the probability of meeting the system needs. In this paper, we present key aspects of the survivability framework, and results of its application to the design of an autonomous ground surveillance vehicle. The relevance of this application is two-fold, namely to serve as a test-bed for validation of the proposed framework, and to respond to heightened homeland various regions of the world