Ground combat robots: Has the era of collaborative combat between humans and robots arrived?

Recently, according to Russian media reports, the Russian marker ground combat robot completed a two-week guard service test at the Vostochny Cosmodrome and will soon be put into service in the Russian security agency to take on the important task of guarding the launch site and other national facilities.

Coincidentally, at the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army held in October this year, American companies demonstrated the world's first four-legged combat robot dog and a ground combat robot carrying cruise missiles. A variety of new ground combat robots have appeared one after another, attracting great attention from the world media. So, what are the extraordinary abilities of these ground combat robots? What are the star products worth paying attention to in various countries around the world? What will be the development trend of ground combat robots in the future?

Russia: Coming from behind and overtaking

The Marker is known as one of Russia's most promising technological projects. It is a very intelligent ground combat robot that made its first public appearance in October 2019. Recently, the Marker completed a series of tests at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia, including station patrols and drone launch tests.

Russia's Marker ground combat robot is tested at the Vostochny Cosmodrome.

The station patrol is to move continuously for 6 hours on a designated 2.5-kilometer circular route to conduct environmental monitoring and perception tests; the drone launch test is to launch more than 20 rotary-wing drones through the robot, and test the initial coordination between the robot and the aerial drone. The Russian military is satisfied with the test results and hopes to incorporate it into the security agency in the near future to be responsible for protecting the security of space launch sites, military industrial enterprises and other important facilities.

The "Marker" is a tracked or wheeled combat vehicle that can carry a variety of weapon modules. It was developed by the Russian Robotics Scientific Production Association and the project was launched in March 2018. The robot weighs about 3 tons and can carry two weapon systems at the same time, including a 12.7mm large-caliber machine gun, a 33/35/40mm grenade launcher, a light anti-tank missile, a reconnaissance/attack rotary-wing drone, etc., and has high-precision shooting capabilities.

In addition, the robot is equipped with target detectors, thermal sensors, day/night infrared cameras and other equipment, and has human-like cognitive capabilities such as environmental information perception, autonomous route planning, and target tracking. The robot can respond autonomously according to the target type, electronically suppress drones and capture them with rope nets, conduct coordinated fire damage with multiple types of weapons on ground targets, shout warnings and non-lethal weapons to intruders, and even dispatch drones to drive them away or attack them.

If the "marker" is a rising star in the Russian ground combat robot family, the "Uranus" ground combat robot series is the leading lady in the Russian robot family. In the just-concluded Russian-Belarusian "West-2021" military exercise, "Uranus-9" and "Nerehta" performed excellently, each with its own division of labor and mutual cooperation, destroying many predetermined targets, which was highly recognized by the Russian military.

Russia's "Uranus-9" has air defense and anti-tank capabilities and is currently the Russian army's most powerful unmanned combat vehicle.

In fact, the first battle where Russian ground combat robots became famous was on the Syrian battlefield. In December 2015, in a battle to besiege Hill 754.5 in Latakia Province, Syria, a team of 6 Platform-M tracked robots, 4 Codeword wheeled robots and several drones, coordinated by the Andromeda-D automated command system, won the world's first battle with ground combat robots as the main force. Although Russian ground combat robots started late, they have developed rapidly in recent years, especially using the Syrian battlefield as a training ground for combat robots, accumulating a lot of actual combat experience, achieving overtaking on the curve, and having the strength to compete with the United States.

The United States: Steady Progress with a Long History

Compared with the brilliant development of Russian ground combat robots, the development of the United States in this field seems to be proceeding step by step. As early as the late 1990s, the United States took the lead in the development of military robots and formulated the "Future Combat System" plan, with the aim of developing a variety of ground combat robots to perform reconnaissance, surveillance, target identification and combat tasks.

The US military once tested combat robots on the battlefield in Iraq.

According to the US Army's vision, ground combat robots will be divided into three levels: light, medium and heavy. Among them, the light combat robot weighs about 7 tons, equipped with anti-tank missiles or light low-recoil weapons, and can cooperate with drones to achieve precision strikes; the medium robot weighs about 15 tons, equipped with medium-caliber machine guns, anti-tank missiles or large-caliber low-recoil weapons, and cooperates with main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles; the heavy robot weighs more than 20 tons, equipped with large-caliber artillery, has a strong strike capability, and can cooperate with M1 Abrams tanks or M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles to carry out operations.

In the following 20 years, the US Army developed many types of ground robots, but emphasized the robots' capabilities in reconnaissance, surveillance, cargo transportation and minesweeping. It was not until recent years that the US military began to pay attention to combat robots and build real ground combat robots.

At the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army held in October this year, two ground combat robots made a wonderful appearance: the world's first four-legged combat robot dog equipped with weapons and the tracked combat robot TRX equipped with cruise missiles. The robot dog launched by Ghost Robotics of the United States is not only agile, but also equipped with a 6.5mm caliber rifle and a thermal imager with 30x zoom, with an effective range of up to 1,200 meters.

The robot dog developed in the United States can perform tasks such as reconnaissance and communication.

Since 2020, the company has cooperated with the US military to carry out robot dog testing, completing test tasks such as base patrols, swamp exploration, and bomb detection and removal. Compared with traditional tracked and wheeled robots, robot dogs have stronger environmental adaptability and higher passability in complex terrain environments such as mountainous areas. The combat robot TRX was developed by General Dynamics Land Systems and is affiliated with the US Army's Future Medium Unmanned Combat Vehicle Program. In addition to a 4-rotor reconnaissance drone, it is also equipped with dozens of switchblade cruise missiles, making it more like a "micro land drone carrier."

Trend: Artificial Intelligence Cluster Combat

Compared with its battlefield-tested predecessors, the Russian "marker" is slightly inferior in size and firepower, but it has a higher level of intelligence and uses a number of artificial intelligence technologies. Soldiers only need to issue target instructions, and the "marker" can independently judge how to approach the target, how to overcome road obstacles, and independently select appropriate weapons to destroy ground and air targets.

In October this year, Russia also conducted a cluster combat test using "markers", which consisted of three wheeled and two tracked "markers". During the test, the robot combat group completed tasks such as target allocation within the group, entering the best firepower position, autonomously responding to rapidly changing combat situations, and exchanging target instructions without human intervention.

According to the plan, Russia will complete the formation of combat robot forces by 2025 and incorporate them into the Russian military's combat sequence to form an integrated combat capability of soldiers and robots.

Russia's Kalashnikov Corporation's unmanned combat vehicles conduct coordinated exercises with soldiers.

The U.S. Army plans to test a complete set of ground combat robots called "company-scale" in 2022, and expressed the hope that in the next 10 years, through the use of robots, artificial intelligence and other technologies, the combat effectiveness of a single infantry platoon of the U.S. military will be increased 10 times compared to the current level.

The US military believes that the coordinated teaming between ground combat robots and soldiers, as well as the autonomous adaptive teaming between robots will become a new form of force teaming on future battlefields.

The robot dog developed by an American company can cooperate with soldiers in combat.

In view of the great advantages of ground combat robots, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Japan, South Korea and other countries are also actively developing and preparing to form robot troops. The Aegis intelligent warning combat robot developed by South Korea has served as a sentry for the South Korean army in Iraq. The robots deployed by Israel on the battlefield in Palestine have caused considerable damage to Hamas soldiers. The United Kingdom also plans to form a robot force in 2030.

The REXMKII unmanned combat vehicle developed by Israel has good maneuverability.

It can be foreseen that ground combat robots are developing in the direction of systematization, intelligence, modularization and generalization. A new combat system of unmanned and manned collaborative combat will be formed on the battlefield of the future, and the unmanned combat corps will also become an important force in the game between military powers.

Text/ Yang Huijun

Editor/Tang Mingjun

Review/Yang Jian and Yang Lei

Producer/Suo Adi

Source: China Aerospace News