Adaptive vehicle navigation in hostile environments

Vehicle navigation is the process of finding a course through which to steer a vehicle to take it from its trip origination point to its destination point. In general, the region traversed by a vehicle contains natural and man-made obstacles. This means that a typical course is segmented, each segment representing a response to a known, or unexpected obstacle. The nature of the obstacle determines the approach used to negotiate it. In this paper, a set of navigation schemes is presented which helps a military vehicle to negotiate two specific types of obstacles: military vehicles and weapons. Some of the schemes are also suitable for negotiating terrain features, e.g. mountains and lakes. The set is part of an adaptive navigation system that is being developed, based on the semantic control system paradigm. Three global navigation schemes and five local navigation schemes are presented. The paper also presents the use of a strategy table as a tool to guide the development of vehicle navigation schemes.