RODEO: Roll-Over Detection for Equipment-transporter Operation

In dismounted operations, combating and marching while carrying heavy loads can quickly exhaust Soldiers/Marines and hence affect the overall OPTEMPO. The Army SMET Program was established to address this capability gap. During the early testing of the SMET prototypes, however, the tele-operated vehicles were found to be prone to frequent rollovers/overturns, especially due to insufficient awareness of the vehicular state. To address the technical challenges, we have been developing RODEO, an add-on kit for a tele-operated SMET vehicle that can predict its future overturn, and subsequently alert the operator through haptic feedback, so that preventive actions can be taken in time. It has been designed to accomplish the forewarning through: 1) Estimation of the vehicle state based on a Bayes model of the world and reading from the sensors attached to the vehicle; 2) Prediction of the future vehicle state based on the results of the current state estimation; and 3) Prediction of the rollover/overturn based on the predicted future vehicle state and a free-body diagram analysis. The feasibility of this approach and a novel haptic feedback system was demonstrated in Phase I. In Phase II, a fully functional prototype will be produced and evaluated for its operability.