New Electric Unmanned Vehicle Charges Itself While on the Move

SINGAPORE AIRSHOW: New Electric Unmanned Vehicle Charges Itself While on the Move

Josh Luckenbaugh photo

SINGAPORE — Singapore-based ST Engineering has introduced a fully electric unmanned ground vehicle that can keep itself charged while on its way to conduct operations.

Among the technical problems confronting militaries looking to electrify their tactical vehicle fleets is figuring out how to ensure the platforms don’t run out of juice on the battlefield. ST Engineering’s new TAURUS unmanned ground vehicle — which the company unveiled at the Singapore Airshow — has a towbar that “allows the platform to be transportable to the site of operations,” and “as it’s being towed, it will perform regenerative charging,” said Chua Teun Yee, principal engineer for land systems at ST Engineering.

“This ensures that the platform is fully charged when it reaches the site of deployment” and ready to be used for “an autonomous mission, or it can be used as a mobile generator for your other systems,” Yee said. The TAURUS can perform a variety of roles — including surveillance, reconnaissance, logistics, search and rescue, casualty evacuation and disaster relief — depending on what type of payloads the customer wants to put on the vehicle, he said.

ST Engineering has been developing autonomous capabilities for vehicles over the last few years — including autonomy for on-road or off-road missions, as well as leader-follower capability — and is working now on “incorporating all these autonomy modules into” the TAURUS, he said. The vehicle’s autonomy suite can be configured to handle capabilities such as teleoperation, follow-me, leader-follower, waypoint navigation and obstacle avoidance, according to a company fact sheet.

Featuring a 4×4 electric drive, the vehicle has a range of 30 kilometers, which can be increased to more than 100 kilometers with a range extender such as a battery or generator set, the fact sheet stated.

The TAURUS on display at the airshow contained “off-the-shelf” payloads provided in collaboration with ST Engineering Aerospace, including a tethered aerial drone and a pan-tilt-zoom camera to showcase the potential of the platform for surveillance operations, Yee said.

Letticia Fong, ST Engineering’s assistant vice president of corporate communications, said surveillance is a “growing area of interest” for platforms like TAURUS. At the time of publication, the company hadn’t received much feedback on the vehicle as it was making its first public appearance at the airshow, she added.

“It’s up to us now to do the marketing in terms of … how do we want to position it and who our target markets are,” in both the defense and commercial space, she said.

Topics: Global Defense Market, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, International