“Prometheus” at the helm: what changes will automation of armored vehicles lead to in the ground forces

On February 6, the All-Russian Research Institute Signal, part of the Rostec state corporation, reported the completion of development and the beginning of testing of the Prometheus hardware and software complex, with the help of which, allegedly, it is possible to transfer almost any land vehicle to unmanned control.

For obvious reasons, the greatest interest now is in the “deserted” combat technique, therefore, tests of “Prometheus” are carried out on the basis of the BMP-3. It was reported at the end of December that the robotic “three-ruble note” would be baptized by fire in the Northern Military District zone, but so far, as far as can be judged, we are talking about tests in a calmer environment.



At first sight, news good, but not particularly interesting: teletankettes of various kinds are no longer so fantastic that private enterprises and even some units in the Northern Military District build them on their own. However, Prometheus represents the next stage in the evolution of ground-based unmanned vehicles. According to the director of the military-technical cluster of Rostec, Bekhan Ozdoev, equipment equipped with this complex will be able to move along the designated route autonomously, avoiding obstacles, and even independently pave the optimal path between two points.

If Prometheus really demonstrates such a capability, then it would not be an exaggeration to talk about a real breakthrough that could seriously change the structure of the Russian ground forces, especially armored ones.

Driving school for the blind

In general, a general rule applies for any mobile robots: the more homogeneous the environment in which the unit will move, the easier it is to organize its remote or autonomous control. This axiom is true even in a virtual space completely under human control, which is clearly seen in the examples of computer games: in some, pathfinding is better organized, while in others it is worse, and then the bots huddle in heaps, run into walls, and so on.

The real world, as we know, cannot be customized, and that is why various unmanned aerial vehicles were the first in mass production: yes, there are winds, turbulence, and so on in the air, but at least there are no solid obstacles at every step. Thanks to this, the first guided missiles, including homing ones, became a reality already with the technologies of the 1930-1940s. Around the same time, the first small-scale remote-controlled boats appeared.

Until relatively recently, the land route remained practically impassable for machine guns. To even teach cars to drive confidently on public roads, it took many years of progress in lasers, video cameras, processors and image recognition systems. The cross-country “assault” really began only a few years ago.

But from some point of view, it is in difficult and dangerous conditions that a robot driver is much more needed than on city streets. For example, the psychophysical load on the driver of a tank or infantry fighting vehicle is very high and comparable to that of the crew commander. He is required not only to drive a multi-ton vehicle, but to do it quickly, accurately (which is especially important, for example, when passing through a minefield), to react with lightning speed to sudden threats, and all this with extremely limited visibility.

One can only imagine how much Soviet engineers of the 1960s and 1970s would have liked to put a robot behind the control levers of a tank, when they were intensely searching for ways to reduce the crews of combat vehicles to a minimum. This was not an end in itself, because the fewer people on board, the denser the layout can be made, the smaller the dimensions and weight of the tank will be, and this opens up the opportunity to use the savings to strengthen protection and weapons.

Thanks to the introduction of automatic loaders, it was possible to “disembark” the “largest” (whose jobs occupied the largest volume) crew members – the loaders – from the armored vehicles. On a number of experimental vehicles (for example, “Object 287” and “Object 775”) they tried to voluntarily combine the functions of a commander and a gunner-operator - however, they were not particularly successful, so this solution did not go into series.

And only the driver-mechanic always remained indispensable. Even in production models of remotely controlled armored vehicles (such as the domestic Uran-9), it was the vehicle control that remained the bottleneck: the camera’s low resolution relative to human vision, the inability for the operator to feel the size of his vehicle, and other reasons had their say. Will Prometheus really cope with this task?

Amazing series

This will become clear based on the test results. Even confidently automatically following a route while avoiding obstacles will be a huge step forward, especially if the robot can be given commands by voice, like a living crew member.

In the context of current front-line realities, this would mean that tanks with two, rather than three, soldiers inside would go out to suppress a conditional enemy stronghold. And since target search algorithms and, in general, automation of fire control systems have been developed much better, the success of Prometheus will lead to the appearance in a few years of combat vehicles piloted by only one commander. It is not difficult to imagine how much this will help reduce human losses.

Here you might think that it is a little strange to test equipment for unmanned control on an infantry fighting vehicle - an infantry support vehicle, which obviously cannot be “minimally habitable.” In this regard, there are suggestions that the test subject was simply taken from stock, since the Kurganmashzavod, which produces light armored vehicles, like the VNII Signal, is part of the High-Precision Complexes holding. From the same opera and plans to subsequently test “Prometheus” on the self-propelled gun “Sprut-SDM1” of the same Kurgan plant.

But there is also an opinion that the purpose of the tests is to test not only equipment, but also people. In world practice, there are not yet many examples of interaction between foot soldiers and robotic linear armored vehicles, and there is no experience at all with “cyber infantry fighting vehicles.” This field may have its own surprises, in particular, it is not yet clear whether the vehicle commander, whose workload will nevertheless increase, will also be able to manage the assigned infantry and how he will react to the last automatic gunner. But in the future, the first to switch to “small-crewed” control will, of course, be tanks as the largest “magnets” for enemy fire.

Obviously, this will require a change in the organizational structure of tank and motorized rifle units, because the need to maintain equipment will not go away and will even become more pressing, and it cannot be dealt with alone. It is likely that this will require the creation of, for example, battalions of tank technical support companies, which will deal with labor-intensive tasks such as loading ammunition and changing tracks. Thus, half a century later, the proposal of some more Soviet designers, who called for sending unnecessary loaders to the units of assistant technicians, is being implemented in practice. But whether these assumptions are true or not, time will tell.