An unmanned ground vehicle for landmine remediation

Abstract

Anti-tank (AT) landmines slow down and endanger military advances and present sizeable humanitarian problems. The remediation of these mines by direct human intervention is both dangerous and costly. The Intelligent Systems & Robotics Group (ISRG) at New Mexico Tech has provided a partial solution to this problem by developing an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) to remediate these mines without endangering human lives. This paper presents an overview of the design and operation of this UGV. Current results and future work are also described herein.To initiate the remediation process the UGV is given the GPS coordinates of previously detected landmines. Once the UGV autonomously navigates to an acceptable proximity of the landmine, a remote operator acquires control over a wireless network link using a joystick on a base station. Utilizing two cameras mounted on the UGV, the operator is able to accurately position the UGV directly over the landmine. The UGV houses a self-contained drill system equipped with its own processing resources, sensors, and actuators. The drill system deploys a neutralizing device over the landmine to neutralize it. One such device, developed by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC®), employs incendiary materials to melt through the container of the landmine and slowly burn the explosive material, thereby safely and remotely disabling the landmine.

Development of a Virtual Reality Simulation Testbed for Collaborative UGV and UAV Research Using MATLAB

“…Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) have been successfully used to detect mines [1,2], explore urban environments in the battlefield [3] or after catastrophic natural disasters [4], and run errands at Olympic events. However, most UGVs struggle when attempting to traverse rough terrain and cluttered environments [5] simply due to the nature of the vehicles mode of locomotion, i.e., most roll on the ground.…”

Towards the conceptual design and construction of an unmanned small-scale air-land-water vehicle

“…In addition some researchers have been design of an unmanned ground vehicle, named Bearcat III, describes from theory to practice. The purpose of this research is to describe the design and implementation of an unmanned ground vehicle [8], [9]. The most other version are manned and unmanned air ground vehicle.…”