“You are a Company or Platoon commander about to undertake an urban operation, which might culminate in contact with enemy forces. As you enter the urban terrain your views along main streets are relatively good, but are figures in the distance hostile or not?

Elsewhere, your line-of-sight is blocked by walls, buildings, shrubbery and all the usual urban clutter, such as power and telephone poles and cables. What waits at the next intersection?

What lies round the corner of the next building or concealed in houses or behind rooftop parapets? Answering those questions will enable you to make sound tactical decisions. But what information can you get that is immediately useful to you and your troops? What can help you determine the threats you face and what your course of action needs to be?

You are aware of a number of potential danger points where the enemy could lay an ambush. Alleyways lie to the side of main road which could conceal your opponents and allow them to move swiftly out of sight. Snipers could wait, concealed on rooftops, behind walls or parapets, or at windows or doorways. A Rocket Propelled Grenade team could be lurking under cover in a shaded suburban garden, ready to strike at a moments notice. Or perhaps an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) lies concealed across your route, waiting to be triggered as you approach”.

Raglan & Vicki Butler-Henderson at the Grand Challenge

Being able to automatically find out these answers was the crux of the UK Ministry of Defence Grand Challenge, the aim of which was to:

“Create a system with a high degree of autonomy that can detect, identify, locate and report a comprehensive range of military threats in a hostile urban environment”.

In response to this Mindsheet put blood, sweat and tears into developing a cooperative fleet of miniature autonomous surveillance vehicles.  Named Testudo, each vehicle can follow a pre-assigned mission plan, avoid obstacles and then wirelessly report back detected threats from the hazard zone to a base station.

The MOD Grand Challenge was a great experience and whilst there was fun to be had alongside the hard work and tension of the final, there are very real consequences to the safety of our troops by delivering solutions that work.  So it was a perfect platform for us to apply the Mindsheet market driven approach to the development of our solution.

In our report, “The Innovation Lens“, we examined the need to collaborate with customers and stakeholders to understand their requirements and generate winning concepts.  This early customer collaboration has a further purpose in mitigating the risks associated with market acceptance.  Early customer feedback means “show stoppers” and “blind alleys” are avoided before large development and launch expenditure is incurred. Also critical, is the importance of gaining customer buy-in during the early stages of development when key trade-off decisions are made.

The MOD Grand Challenge presented us with the perfect opportunity to demonstrate this.  We involved soldiers in the Mindsheet team with active service experience from Afghanistan; and then we partnered with a traditional military supplier MBDA (who provided the vehicle planning system for Testudo). Furthermore, the MOD, the military and scientists provided valuable guidance throughout each stage of the challenge.

But exposing your solution to the market early on comes with caveats:

- Do protect your intellectual property early on to prevent your ideas being copied.  (See our article Fast ways to protect your IP).

- Do present your concepts in a realistic way through prototypes and market materials so that accurate validation can be performed by the customers.

Mindsheet's Testudo Robot

On the latter point, we brought the Grand Challenge concept alive through rapid build of our prototype model using off the shelf materials where possible. The chassis came from a rugged remote control toy platform with a top speed of 35MPH, (yes we did have lots of fun testing them).  The same off the shelf approach applied to the sensors and communications.  Rather than wasting time or resources re-engineering the chassis, we put our effort into threat detection algorithms and vehicle control behaviours, where the true opportunity for innovation lay.   Check out videos of our robots here.

Our demo and feedback sessions to the stakeholders were further enhanced by the preparation of marketing materials and video footage of the vehicle being used by soldiers to seek out IEDs and bomb threats.

However, nothing could have prepared us for the extremes of weather thrown at us during the final in August 2008. Whilst our vehicles coped admirably with the realities of the environment, others were less fortunate and in some cases had to pull out of the competition due to the wind and rain.

But as Professor Phil Sutton, Director General Science Technology Strategy said: “In reality, in operations you can’t choose the weather so this has been a good test”.

So did our early customer collaboration pay off?  Whilst we weren’t crowned ultimate winner of the event, we did qualify as one of only seven finalists, we successfully detected and located 5 threats within the urban zone, we successfully rejected the civilian decoys and we came up with a solution that perhaps represented the most portable, practical and reliable solution of all the finalists on display. Hence, we are now in discussions with the MOD and our partners to take the concept forward.