Emerging X-by-Wire capabilities for military crew and platform protection

Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) have claimed many lives during recent wars. The response from military vehicle designers has been to provide more and more armour. However, this may not be the best long-term solution, as, amongst other factors, the weight of the vehicle increases dramatically. Aligning to the trend of more electric vehicles, this paper presents a different approach to tackle this problem which provides better protection for the crew, by removing the driver from the traditional physical location in the vehicle. A solution, such as Steer-by-Wire, leading to Drive-by-Wire crew station, can physically shift the location of the crew in the vehicle, thereby providing better protection against IEDs. This paper describes a procedure for designing such a system; it also describes a representative vehicle platform that has been assembled to demonstrate the proposed system functionality.