With UAVs being common throughout the world, why aren’t there many unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) being used for military applications yet?
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Oh boy oh boy.
When I was in the Army 20 years ago, i got to play with a remote controlled M1 tank. Now, the turret had been removed and we used it for clearing land mines and some types of obstacles.
Airborne vehicles don’t have to worry about too many obstacles so long as they fly a few hundred meters above ground level they aren’t going to run into anything, or drive into a hole in the ground. Most of the larger UAV’s the US military uses are controlled by operators hundreds to thousands of miles away with satellites and high altitude aircraft being used to bounce the wireless signal between the vehicle and the operator. So there is going to be lag between an operator pulling the trigger or changing speed or adjusting altitude and the vehicle actually responding. Finally, aviation autopilot systems work (when the operator is not in contact with the vehicle) because of the first point mentioned (not a lot of stuff to hit and all you really need to worry programming a vehicle to do is moving to a high altitude and make a lazy circle until communication is reestablished or the vehicle runs out of fuel.
Now, ground based vehicles are going to be WAY trickier.
Think about trying to drive a car as fast as you can while weaving through traffic but everything is laggy. What you see is a few seconds behind what is actually happening and what you do to control the vehicle takes a few seconds to actually start happening. It would be like playing a First Person Shooter video game with a terrible internet connection. Only in real life, your driving a multi million dollar tank into a building, or flipping it into a ditch, or driving over people or vehicles, or driving into a 10,000 gallon fuel tanker, etc.
Now you can try to have operators closer to the vehicle but that puts the operator (and the operator’s equipment) into positions where they can be captured and now somebody’s got a new toy.
Trying to use cameras on ground vehicles is okay for something like land mine / obstacle clearing but trying to sneak around a battlefield with a large armored vehicle and trying do everything through cameras is going to be tough. Maybe fancier cameras with a whole team of operators could make it work in the best case scenarios but those cameras are going to be weak points. Dust, driving into bright lights, snow, rain, leaves, paint, soot from smoke will all massively impair the operator’s ability to see the surroundings of the vehicle.
If anything goes wrong with an airborne vehicle, unless it crashes, it can just be flown back to base. If anything goes wrong with a ground vehicle, before anything can be fixed it needs to get away from a combat zone without causing problems or being destroyed in the process. A machine gun jams? Auto loader for the cannon misfeeds? Machine gun barrel overheats and needs to be changed? Trying to fill an entire tank with all the robotics to handle those everyday issues on the battlefield just creates a limitless number of failure points.
Another thing to consider. If an unmanned air vehicle gets shot down or malfunctions, it crashing will render it mostly useless for anybody else to use. They don’t typically carry a ton of ammo. If a remote tank malfunctions or gets “mobility killed”, well, that means all of its 20mm ~ 120mm cannon rounds (if they can’t be fired they can be used for improvised explosives), one or two fully automatic machine guns with belts of 5.56 or 7.62 ammo (though I guess special guns and ammo could be used) that can be used by all sorts of other guns, and possibly a 40mm automatic grenade launcher. If this robo vehicle is a retrofit of an existing manned chassis, then a captured remote land vehicle can have the robotic guts removed and now it becomes a regular tank that opposing forces can now use.
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