Mobile Mines

The following proposal will examine the concept of directing a fleet of mobile mines to establish a mixed field in remote areas. It will leverage our work on the canister-launched mines, man-in-the-loop mines (TNM-APLA), non-lethal mines and Lemmings. While mines seem like a simple weapon, our work in mine design has shown that a very thorough systems analysis is required to make them so. The systems approach will be even more important in the mobile mine application. Our work with the original Lemmings has also taught us where many of the issues lie. While Lemmings is a counter-mine robot, it contains all of the essential elements (including explosives and fuzing) that make it a mobile mine. The Lemmings is not size optimized and the requirement to recover the mines after hostilities adds new and not insignificant challenges. The program will test several concepts. A system trade-off will be performed to assess the volume and weight overhead associated with locomotion in terms of batteries, motors, wheels/tracks, controllers, etc. We will determine the limits of practical mine shrinkage and contrast it against a concept where a robot lays and later performs a pick up and carry away (PUCA) operation. We will explore different methods of creating a spread pattern representing the typical 'A' patterns. It will also explore other patterns which are not possible when hand laid fields are employed.