HAAM: High-mobility, Articulated, All-wheel drive, Modular vehicle

The United States military's current doctrine calls for the ability to quickly deploy small units to any place on the globe. The two biggest challenges of this new doctrine are providing the airlift capability for the military's vehicles and overcoming the infrastructure that is incapable of supporting the military's vehicle that is found in many Third-World nations. A new vehicular technology, based on high-mobility, articulated, modular, all-wheel-drive vehicles will overcome these challenges by providing the necessary functional capabilities in smaller-than-current-vehicle modules. The goal of this proposed Phase I SBIR is to develop and simulate these new vehicular technologies and to prove their mobility characteristics using existing mobility models. In addition to the issues related to deployability, we plan to address the issues of component and functional modularity. Thus from a set of common components, modules can be constructed; and from the modules, a wide variety of vehicle systems with a broad spectrum of capabilities can be assembled. Finally, this system must have a number of other important characteristics, such as high speed operation, silent operation, drive-by-wire control, low-signature, good fuel economy, the ability to selectively armor and protect the crew, and be extremely capable of negotiating a variety of terrain. BENEFITS: The component and functional modularity characteristics allow civilian police, fire and rescue units to purchase several pieces of a large system for use for particular applications. As the organization's needs expand, more pieces can be purchased to provide greater capability without ever requiring large captical expenditures.