**3. Mission of autonomous vehicles**

Autonomous vehicles (ground or air) are especially valuable in environments where immediate information feedback is needed, manned ground or air vehicles are unavailable or excessive risk or other conditions render use of manned vehicles less than deliberate. The autonomous vehicles can conduct day and night operations to support units.

The autonomous vehicle missions can include:

	- Combat search and rescue (C-SAR),
	- Target acquisition (TA),
	- Battle damage assessment (BDA),
	- Rear area security,
	- Situation awareness (SA) development,
	- Intelligent preparation of battlefield (IPB),
	- Electronic warfare (EW),
	- Communications relay,
	- Mine and chemical detection,
	- Mine cleaning,
	- Weather surveillance,
	- Material and munition resupply,
	- Casualty evacuation.

In case of that autonomous vehicle is equipped by a weapon system (considered as a combat vehicle) it can fulfill combat missions to destroy enemy in open terrain, in vehicles or covered in shelters or in buildings.

Special consideration for mission planning is if autonomous vehicle act independently (alone) or act in cooperation with other vehicle or with units (soldiers) or act in swarming collaboration (dozens of vehicles).
