Unmanned vehicles, without question, represent one of the hottest technological areas in today’s military and aerospace industry. Unmanned aerial vehicles — better known as UAVs — are the most mature and established systems in this rapidly developing new field. At the same time, however, unmanned ground vehicles and unmanned underwater vehicles are finding important new niches in military and aerospace applications.
In the Middle East, unmanned aerial vehicles patrol the skies at high altitudes for strategic applications, and at low altitudes for tactical uses such as reconnaissance and surveillance. The armed Predator UAV is even engaging high-priority targets in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The future holds even more promise. Unmanned ground vehicles are find a growing number of uses, from military surveillance and landmine neutralization to civil bomb disposal. Under the oceans, unmanned vehicles are surveying potentially hostile harbors and hold the potential to seek out and destroy anti-ship mines. In the air, meanwhile, unmanned vehicle development is moving beyond reconnaissance and surveillance. The next-generation «unmanned combat aerial vehicles,» or UCAVs, will take on search-and-destroy missions and carry a wide variety of munitions.
From an electronics and optoelectronics perspective, we at Military & Aerospace Electronics understand that unmanned vehicles are primarily about payloads — cameras, sensors, manipulators, communications packages, and smart munitions. These platforms also are about smart navigation subsystems, high-speed networking, and small, complex flight-control computers.
This supplement from PennWell, publishers of Military & Aerospace Electronics, is entitled Unmanned Vehicles: The New Soldier? It is a guideline to important unmanned systems and their payloads that are helping today’s and tomorrow’s military and homeland-security forces tackle important, dangerous, and dirty jobs without putting humans at risk. That is the promise of unmanned vehicles.
John Keller
editor-in-chief
Military & Aerospace Electronics July, 2004
Author(s) : John Keller
