Development of Mine Detection Robot System
The Mine Detection Robot supports the mine removal work in countries where mines are buried, such as Afghanistan. The development started from September, 2003. Considering running on rough terrains, the robot has four crawlers, and hydraulic motors in front and rear were serially connected by piping so that they could rotate synchronously. Two work arms were mounted on the robot, one was a horizontal multi-joint SCARA type with motorized 2-link arm, while the other was a vertical multi-joint manipulator with 6 degrees of freedom. Also, domestic evaluation tests were carried out from February to March, 2005, followed by overseas validation tests in Croatia from February to March, 2006. These tests were conducted with a mine detecting senor mounted on the Robot, and the detection performance was evaluated by its mine detection rate.
Land Mine Detecting Robot Capable of Path Planning
The Landmine detecting robots are designed to cover maximum possible area of landmine field for detection of landmines. The detected landmines along with scanned and leftover area are represented on a visual map with accuracy in millimeters. This paper presents a prototype model of land mine detecting robot that is powerful yet low cost and easily controllable. A graphical user interface is developed for plotting the landmines, scanned & leftover area presentation, PID tuning and camera alignment. Emphasis is placed on the control of the differential drive robot in auto mode, semi-auto mode and the manual mode. Image processing technique is employed to find the accurate position of robot which provides the live reckoning feedback to the dead reckoning servo control of the robot. Metal detector is the sensor used to detect landmines. The graphical user interface for the remote terminal computer provides the effective control for the robot. The system is simple but powerful and intelligible to achieve the required results.
Robotic system for humanitarian demining
This research aims to build a practical mobile robotic system to be used in actual humanitarian demining tasks. The basic system consists of a manipulator mounted on top of a mobile platform. For the purpose of building a practical and versatile mobile platform, the authors have already developed a 4-wheel autonomous buggy system called "Gryphon", as discussed in previous works. This paper addresses the development of an energy-efficient weight-compensated manipulator, which is composed of a 5-node parallel linkage. The manipulator was especially designed for antipersonnel mine detection and removal tasks. The weight-compensation concept and the principle of operation are discussed in detail, and the validity and usefulness of the manipulator, as well as of the whole robotic system, are demonstrated by real experiments.