Heads-Up Display for Control of Unmanned Ground Vehicles

As data, intelligence, and information become a larger part of the battlefield, soldiers are relying more on helmet mounted displays (HMD) in order to provide a method to not only keep critical data readily available but to remotely view sensors from unmanned ground vehicles (UGV). Research has shown that current HMD systems and controllers are difficult to use and that most soldiers choose not to wear a HMD when it is not critical"opting to only clip on the HMD when needed. This is due to the obscuration of the soldiers view of the battlefield from the HMD. In addition, the handheld controllers tend to be unwieldy and cause the soldier to tend to look down in order to control the UGV, thus losing situational awareness and requiring the solider to take his hands off of his weapon. For Heads-Up Display for Control of Unmanned Ground Vehicles, TPL proposes a novel approach to combining the HMD with an eye tracking camera and 6 degree-of-freedom (DOF) sensor suite to allow for control of a UGV that eliminates the obscuration caused by todays HMD systems and allows for the soldier to keep his hands on the weapon. TPL envisions the Common Heads-Up Display and UGV Controller (CHUD-UGV Controller) embedded within a single pair of eyeglasses. This design permits greater than 90% of the incoming light to be directly viewed by the soldier by placing a beam combiner module directly into one of the front eyeglass lenses in the bottom half of the field of view.