The Army's Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) and Early Infantry Brigade Combat Team (E-IBCT) Programs: Background and Issues for Congress

This report looks at budget requests for the Army's Future Combat System (FCS) program, Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) program, and brigade combat teams (BCTs). It ends with a discussion of potential issues for Congress

The Army's Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) and Early Infantry Brigade Combat Team (E-IBCT) Programs: Background and Issues for Congress

This report looks at budget requests for the Army's Future Combat System (FCS) program, Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) program, and brigade combat teams (BCTs). It ends with a discussion of potential issues for Congress

The Army's Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) and Early Infantry Brigade Combat Team (E-IBCT) Programs: Background and Issues for Congress

Report that looks at budget requests for the Army's Future Combat System (FCS) program, Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) program, and brigade combat teams (BCTs). It ends with a discussion of potential issues for Congress

The Army's Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) Program: Background and Issues for Congress

Report that looks at the history and current need for a Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) program. Potential issues for Congress include the role and need for the GCV in a downsized Army that will likely have fewer heavy brigade combat teams (HBCTs)

Coordination of an Unmanned Vehicle with Active Suspension over Extreme Terrain

Active suspension is now a well-tried technology in road vehicles. It has been installed on a HMMV and demonstrated to significantly improve performance in rough road conditions1. This capability presents an opportunity for improved mobility in off-road conditions. The challenge is to devise a means of translating the desired trajectory of the vehicle into commands to the suspension actuators and the traction motors in an optimal, or near optimal manner. In this paper we describe part of a software architecture that was developed to enable such performance from a six-wheeled vehicle with active suspension and independent wheel drives. The vehicle was a concept developed under the DARPA Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle Program

Systems engineering approach to ground combat vehicle survivability in urban operations

Ground combat vehicles (GCV) traditionally rely on passive armor to reduce their vulnerability against threats. This is insufficient now, given the increasing gap between threat lethality and passive armor capability and the change in threat scenario from relatively open terrain to urban terrain. This thesis provides an overview of system survivability and discusses the conventional approach to GCV survivability. This thesis then uses a systems engineering approach to guide the subsequent study, which identifies likely threats to GCVs in an urban environment and discusses potential susceptibility reduction techniques and technologies that can counter the threats. This thesis then develops a survivability assessment model (using Imagine That's ExtendSim), which quantifies the different survivability characteristics of a GCV and determines the sets of survivability characteristics to meet the defined survivability requirement. Finally, this thesis demonstrates the use of a decision-making methodology (multi-attribute decision-making) to manage the capability conflicts that arise between survivability and other key platform capabilities. Therefore, this author hopes to help military planners and engineers design more robust, holistic and balanced survivability solutions for GCVs, to provide more flexibility against different types of threats and threat scenarios.http://archive.org/details/systemsengineeri1094550510Senior Engineer, Defence Science & Technology Agency, SingaporeApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Design of an Agile Unmanned Combat Vehicle - A Product of the DARPA UGCV Program

The unmanned ground combat vehicle (UGCV) design evolved by the SAIC team on the DARPA UGCV Program is summarized in this paper. This UGCV design provides exceptional performance against all of the program metrics and incorporates key attributes essential for high performance robotic combat vehicles. This performance includes protection against 7.62 mm threats, C130 and CH47 transportability, and the ability to accept several relevant weapons payloads, as well as advanced sensors and perception algorithms evolving from the PerceptOR program. The UGCV design incorporates a combination of technologies and design features, carefully selected through detailed trade studies, which provide optimum performance against mobility, payload, and endurance goals without sacrificing transportability, survivability, or life cycle cost. The design was optimized to maximize performance against all Category I metrics. In each case, the performance of this design was validated with detailed simulations, indicating that the vehicle exceeded the Category I metrics. Mobility metrics were analyzed using high fidelity VisualNastran vehicle models, which incorporate the suspension control algorithms and controller cycles times. DADS/Easy 5 3-D models and ADAMS simulations were also used to validate vehicle dynamics and control algorithms during obstacle negotiation

Army Future Combat System (FCS) "Spin- Outs" and Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV): Background and Issues for Congress

This report discusses the Future Combat System (FCS), which was a multiyear, multibillion dollar program at the heart of the Army's transformation efforts

Analysis of Thick Sandwich Shells with Embedded Ceramic Tiles

The Composite Armored Vehicle (CAV) is an advanced technology demonstrator of an all-composite ground combat vehicle. The CAV upper hull is made of a tough light-weight S2-glass/epoxy laminate with embedded ceramic tiles that serve as armor. The tiles are bonded to a rubber mat with a carefully selected, highly viscoelastic adhesive. The integration of armor and structure offers an efficient combination of ballistic protection and structural performance. The analysis of this anisotropic construction, with its inherent discontinuous and periodic nature, however, poses several challenges. The present paper describes a shell-based 'element-layering' technique that properly accounts for these effects and for the concentrated transverse shear flexibility in the rubber mat. One of the most important advantages of the element-layering technique over advanced higher-order elements is that it is based on conventional elements. This advantage allows the models to be portable to other structural analysis codes, a prerequisite in a program that involves the computational facilities of several manufacturers and government laboratories. The element-layering technique was implemented into an auto-layering program that automatically transforms a conventional shell model into a multi-layered model. The effects of tile layer homogenization, tile placement patterns, and tile gap size on the analysis results are described