Design and development of a landmines removal robot

Abstract

Humanitarian demining is a calamity of war affecting many third world countries. Mines are cheap weapons, built to sustain horrible injuries that target active people with a knock‐on effect upon economic growth. The clearing is time consuming and expensive. Clearing is an engineering duty and the humanitarian goal is a technical challenge. Advanced robotics fulfils this task cleanly and reliably on the condition that upgrades and cost are met, meaning that they lose third‐world appropriateness. The challenge is to turn local machines and awareness into effective robotic aids, willingly used by the local people, and to enhance the on‐going outcomes. The solution to the demining problem shall be a low cost robotic outfit with resort to nearby available resources and competences (e.g., drawn from the local agricultural machinery and know‐how). This paper discusses an ongoing project that aims to develop a low‐cost robot with intelligent remote‐command abilities, as a cheap productivity upgrading, assembled from standard farming devices, through the shared know‐how and commitment of locally involved operators. During the study, the authors have developed a low‐cost robot capable of removing mines. The robot consists of modified agricultural components including its mobile carrier and the mine effector.