Autonomous navigation platform with waypoint driving and obstacle avoidance. Autonomy module running on higher-tier compute hardware, with LiDAR for perception. Three concrete capabilities:

• Tactical Control. The pilot stops driving the UGV turn-by-turn and instead clicks a destination on a live cost-map. The UGV plans its own collision-free route and drives there autonomously. This is the cognitive-load fix — eliminates the need for a co-pilot on long missions, and lets a single operator point the way over multi-kilometre legs without continuous attention.

• Return-to-Home. When connection is lost and the UGV has been stationary for 10 seconds, it automatically retraces along the most-recently-travelled path to the home position. When connection is restored, it stops and hands control back to the pilot. Same-path retrieval is the operationally safest pattern — the path was just traversed, the situation is known.

• Obstacle avoidance on pre-programmed paths. The UGV stays moving forward through varying GPS conditions and around obstacles the pilot didn't see at planning time.