Developments and Challenges for Autonomous Unmanned Vehicles

It is widely anticipated that autonomous vehicles will have a transformational impact on military forces and will play a key role in many future force structures. As a result, many tasks have already been identified that unmanned systems could undertake more readily than humans. However, for this to occur, such systems will need to be agile, versatile, persistent, reliable, survivable and lethal. This will require many of the vehicles ‘cognitive’ or higher order functions to be more fully develo