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IPFS News Link • Inventions

Chinese Autonomous Tanks: Driving Themselves to a Battlefield Near You?

• By Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer

This ATV has been equipped to drive by itself. The sensor box has been mounted high as possible to give it wide a field of view as possible. A self driving ATV might appeal to a lazy outdoorsman and doesn't scream intimidation, but its larger Chinese autonomous cousins, like the ZSD-63 armored personnel carrier, certainly will grab anyone's attention.

The US Navy made news this week by announcing a new type of autonomous robotic boat for protecting its fleet, but China is showing that it can play the same game, just on the land.

While the the US military has deployed over 12,000 unmanned ground systems in its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as the iRobot Packbot and Foster Miller Talon, they have been remotely operated and mostly of small size. The only large vehicle types, such as the BAE Black Knight light tank, have been test systems, never deployed.  Akin to the difference between a RC toy and a Google Car, autonomous vehicles differ from such remotely operated systems by using data from onboard sensors to navigate through off-road and urban terrain without human input.  In the category of Armored Fighting Vehicles (AFV), the only American autonomous systems have been technology demonstrators like the National Robotics Engineering Center's Crusher and Army Research Lab 's XUV, not based off of existing U.S. AFV chassis.