At the recent IAV Conference held in Twickenham, London, Active Safety System Technologies (ASST) revealed its concept for a novel approach to breaching minefields.
As the recent war in Ukraine has shown, all current breaching vehicles are vulnerable and making progress through a defended minefield is at best dangerous work, with many mine-ploughs and mine-rollers disabled, causing obstacles for the trailing vehicles.
Roger Sloman, the CEO of ASST presented an attentive International audience with proposals for increasing the mine resilience of existing mine rollers / ploughs and an entirely new concept for a dedicated mine-breaching vehicle.
Pervasive modern surveillance technology ensures that any major minefield breaching operation will be opposed.
All current breaching systems are mounted on a tank or APC vehicle.
As such the system is vulnerable to direct fire, RPGs and AT missiles (and now drones) and a single hit on the vehicle is likely to disable it.
Even if complete air superiority is achieved before starting the operation long range precision artillery, missiles and drones will still be effective threats.
What started as a wish to find a better route to breach minefields, resulted in the concept of the ABBS Minefield Breaching Vehicle
With multiple redundancy of key motive elements, the use of a space frame and V hulls for mine protection, the concept makes use of ABBS’ patented  technology in various areas of the design.
Application of Technology
Whilst the Minefield Breaching Vehicle concept will take many months of prototyping and development before it can be made available to front-line troops, it became obvious that some of the same technology can be utilised to make existing Uncrewed Ground Vehicles (UGVs) mine resistant and increase the resilience of existing mine-roller and mine-plough technology.
This is particularly important as armies move to using UGVs for casualty evacuation roles (CASEVAC) and Pathfinders in front of advancing troops or vehicles, where the UGV should be capable of taking multiple mine strikes without being disabled or overturned.
The show has allowed ASST to develop excellent contacts within the US, UK and other NATO country teams looking at improving minefield breaching methodsas well as showcasing their unique technology to the specialist UGV developers.
More details about our UGV Concepts and our Minefield Breaching Vehicle.