Vehicles to map battle environments

This is the goal of a three-year Cranfield University research programme supported by BAE Systems.

Principal investigator Nabil Aouf, a researcher at Cranfield Defence and Security, said the project follows up work the university did last year with BAE Systems on developing a single autonomous vehicle capable of overlapping high-resolution video images – a process known as mosaicing – from multiple on-board cameras. 

According to Aouf, the goal now is to make a group of up to 10 of these vehicles share and overlap mosaiced video images. ‘High-resolution video mosaicing based on co-operative vehicles will not only offer clearer and wider 2D and 3D scene views, but it will also help the autonomy of these ground vehicles in terms of navigation, obstacle avoidance and their precision.’

Each vehicle will acquire images and send them wirelessly to one ‘master’ vehicle, which will collect the information and send back a mosaiced video. A full map of the operation environment could be viewed remotely from a military command station.