Experimental design for assessing the effectiveness of autonomous countermine systems

The countermine mission (CM) is a compelling example of what autonomous systems must address to reduce risks that Soldiers take routinely. The list of requirements is formidable and includes autonomous navigation, autonomous sensor scanning, platform mobility and stability, mobile manipulation, automatic target recognition (ATR), and systematic integration and control of components. This paper compares and contrasts how the CM is done today against the challenges of achieving comparable performance using autonomous systems. The Soldier sets a high standard with, for example, over 90% probability of detection (Pd) of metallic and low-metal mines and a false alarm rate (FAR) as low as 0.05/m 2 . In this paper, we suggest a simplification of the semi-autonomous CM by breaking it into three components: sensor head maneuver, robot navigation, and kill-chain prosecution. We also discuss the measurements required to map the system's physical and state attributes to performance specifications and note that current Army countermine metrics are insufficient to the guide the design of a semi-autonomous countermine system.