Concept Study into Armored Uncrewed Ground Vehicles Announced by Dstl

A concept study to explore solutions to protect Uncrewed Ground Vehicles and ensure high levels of mobility, survivability and mission availability has been announced by The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at DSEI London By Sarah Simpson / 17 Sep 2021

Discover Leading Defense Technology Solutions

Discover cutting-edge solutions from leading global suppliers
SUPPLIER SPOTLIGHT
Concept Study into Armored Uncrewed Ground Vehicles Announced by Dstl
Follow DA

The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) has initiated a study into future Uncrewed Ground Vehicle (UGV) concepts to explore cost effective solutions to protect UGVs from threat and provide specific armour and technology that will ensure high levels of mobility, survivability and mission availability to support crewed platforms in battlefield warfare.

The work has been carried out in conjunction with a consortium led by RBSL with Prodrive, ARKE, ThinkCreative, Cranfield University and BAE Systems as key partners, and was announced at the 2021 Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) trade exhibition.

The concept study has focused on 2 timescales: the near term which addresses solutions that could be realised using currently available or mature technologies, and the longer term looking at technologies that are likely to be available 10 years or further ahead.

The focus has been on medium weight platforms, around 2 to 5 tonnes, which have been the subject of a lot of interest due to the useful payloads they can carry.

The Dstl project lead Matt Ackroyd explained: “When Uncrewed Ground Vehicles were first fielded it was usually for dangerous tasks such as deactivating or destroying Improvised Explosive Devices with the goal of removing the operators from harm’s way and accepting the device itself was at risk of damage or destruction. As thinking on the use of UGVs evolved the focus moved to so called ‘Dull, Dirty and Dangerous’ tasks such as route proving, contaminated ground reconnaissance and decontamination.”

“Today the trend is towards the use of UGVs as platforms for key combat capabilities such as resupply, casualty evacuation, reconnaissance, weapons platforms, decoys and communication nodes.”

Matt continued: “This is very exciting work. As well as enhancing mobility the novel suspension systems significantly improve the ride and hence improve reliability and provide a stable sensor and weapon platform. The use of armour protection for key components and enhanced signature management systems to exploit the benefits of the small platform size have been explored along with weight and cost effective means to provide robustness, redundancy and fall back modes. The concepts are now being benchmarked against the performance of best in class current UGVs and their operational use explored in synthetic environment based experimentation.”

Posted by Sarah Simpson Edited by Sarah Simpson, Content Manager with a passion for research and creating digital copy with a focus on new technology. Connect & Contact

Latest Articles

Practical Methods for Balancing UAV Propellers Safely & Effectively

Tyto Robotics discusses the ways to add and remove materials from drone propellers, considering advantages and disadvantages of various products and techniques

Jul 11, 2025
Military-Grade Tethered Drone Systems for Surveillance & Security Missions

DPI UAV Systems (Dragonfly Pictures) is a developer of advanced tethered drone systems for military, government and security applications. As...

Jul 11, 2025
Modular Chassis Design Enhances Deployment Flexibility for Defense Systems

LCR Embedded Systems explains how modular chassis design supports rapid deployment and cost-effective packaging for rugged embedded systems using open standards like VPX and SOSA

Jul 10, 2025
MilDef to Supply Rugged IT Equipment for Norway’s Defense Digitization

MilDef has secured a major contract with Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace to supply rugged IT equipment supporting Norway’s defense digitization efforts

Jul 10, 2025
Tethered Drone Technologies for Mission-Critical Defense & Security Applications

Defense Advancement showcases Elistair's tethered drone solutions for mission-critical defense and security applications

Jul 10, 2025
New Oscilloquartz Optical Cesium Clocks Enhance Network Timing Precision

Adtran is expanding its Oscilloquartz portfolio with the new OSA 3200 SP and OSA 3250 ePRC optical cesium models, providing improved holdover and simplified maintenance for telecom, data center, utility, and defense networks

Jul 09, 2025

Featured Content

New Oscilloquartz Optical Cesium Clocks Enhance Network Timing Precision

Adtran is expanding its Oscilloquartz portfolio with the new OSA 3200 SP and OSA 3250 ePRC optical cesium models, providing improved holdover and simplified maintenance for telecom, data center, utility, and defense networks

Jul 09, 2025
Teledyne FLIR OEM Whitepaper: Synthetic Data Generation for AI Object Detection

Read Teledyne FLIR OEM’s whitepaper on AIMMGen™, a defense-oriented synthetic data and AI model generation pipeline tailored to Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) and object classification tasks

Jul 03, 2025
Galvion’s Production Hub in Poland Now Open & Operational

Galvion's new Production Hub in Poland has formally opened through a large ceremony held at the Gdansk facility with factory tours, demonstrations, and live models of helmets

Jun 30, 2025
Advancing Defense Capability Through Strategic Collaboration Defense Advancement works with major OEMs to foster collaboration and increase engagement with SMEs, to accelerate innovation and drive defense capabilities forward.