Approach towards achieving interoperability between military land vehicle and robotic systems

The battlefield scenarios are changing around the world presenting new challenges for the military. Battlefield environments have moved from the open to urban and constricted spaces forcing the military to adopt new doctrines and tactics for effective attack and defence. Whilst there have been many advances at the equipment level to support the ground forces i.e. the evolution of military vehicles and the introduction of robotic systems, there still exists a big gap in making these two entities work together. This gap also makes the idea of achieving a fully functional Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) environment less feasible. The data collected by the vehicles and robots need to be exchanged flawlessly so that the best operational picture of the battlefield can be presented to the ground forces for taking the correct action. Since the military operations nowadays require multinational forces conducting operations together, it is essential that the equipments from various countries are able to interoperate with each other in a coalition environment. Furthermore, the range of legacy sensors and other sub-systems available need to be interoperable with the new vehicles and robots to provide the teeth to the military for conducting operations. In order to support NATO military land vehicles for standardisation and interoperability, the NATO Generic Vehicle Architecture (NGVA) proposes an open architecture approach to land vehicle platform design and integration. The Robotics and Autonomous Systems Ground (RAS-G) Interoperability Profiles (IOPs) from the US Army, on the other hand, describe hardware and software interfaces for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs). In this paper, we present an approach towards achieving interoperability between the NGVA and IOP to support the future coalition battlefields. It allows the NGVA-based military land vehicles to be able to control UGVs and allows the exchange of ISR and other required data without any dependencies and bottlenecks.