Humanitarian demining: path planning and remote robotic sweeping

Abstract

Purpose -Humanitarian demining is addressed as an engineering-driven duty, aiming at optimal price/effectiveness figures, joining low-cost robotics and flexible automation. The mine sweeping is highly dangerous task, and safety is sought by automatic rigs, with remote steering and control. The small price is achieved with resort to locally available equipment, technology and know-how. Design/methodology/approach -The robotic solutions are split at three levels: the mobility enabler, exploiting standard agricultural machinery; the demining outfits, specialising cheap end-effectors; the robot path planner, exploring reliable remote govern options. The approach aims at the pacewise deployment of consistent rigs with assessed productivity and tiny investment. Findings -The paper explores basic ideas to modify common agricultural machines, placing in front proper effectors and specifying the guidelines needed to choose both carriers and suitable demining tools. The remote command logic of the suggested demining strategy is then outlined, specifying the communication and instrumentation for the case study. Finally, the warning/emergency occurrences management is described. Practical implications -The ensuing robotic equipment joins the remote-command abilities, with safe and reliable management of dangerous tasks and emergency healing, to the technological appropriateness (shared know-how and commitment) and the price tag fitness (on-place device availability). The final set-up grants dramatic up-grading, as compared with the current demining practice. Originality/value -Unmanned mine-clearing is presently a sophisticated accomplishment of the industrialised countries' armies. By the prospected methods/fixtures, the technical/economic feasibility of the practice is shown to be practicable in third-world countries.

Humanitarian Demining Serial-Tracked Robot: Design and Dynamic Modeling

“…The platform is to be used as an environmental monitoring robot for humanitarian demining and for search and rescue. In paper [13] are presented some unmanned vehicles (agricultural machines domain) for mine removal. It also presented the conceptual design of the end-effector with planning strategies and the command software.…”

“…By imposing independence conditions on virtual elementary displacements and knowing that (13), the generalized forces can be inferred with the following equations:…”

Formal specification and verification of a team formation protocol using TLA+

“…Task execution in a partially observable environment, where the agents (robots) are spatially distributed and no agent has a global view of the environment, is a challenging problem. It has wide applications in search and rescue, 1–3 space exploration, 4 demining, 5 where a team of autonomous robots is deployed since direct human intervention is impossible or impractical. Task execution is done by a team of agents (robots).…”

Complete coverage path planning of mobile robots for humanitarian demining

“…For the humanitarian demining application most approaches are semi-autonomous, i.e., use remote steering and control (Hemapala, Belotti, Michelini and Razzoli, 2009) or move a robot randomly with some simple heuristics (Kopacek, 2002). Approach presented in (Cobano, Ponticelli and Santos, 2008) focuses on irregular terrain with low vegetation and does not include obstacles.…”