Intelligent Prodder: Implementation of Measurement Methodologies for Material Recognition and Classification With Humanitarian Demining Applications

In this paper, a novel sensing technique for material recognition is presented. This issue is actually particularly addressed due to its large application fields, such as, for example, humanitarian demining, recycling industry, or material processing. The proposed approach is based on the contact between the sensing unit and the surface of the unknown material: an intelligent prodder has been developed that stimulates the material surface and reads the response. The measurement procedure identifies a set of suitable parameters from the viscoelastic response and uses these parameters for material recognition and classifications. Both the stimulation and the sensing functions have been implemented using piezoelectric transducers. An experimental prototype of the system has been realized and characterized against a large set of materials of interest in the area of humanitarian demining, and the false positive rate has been determined for the set of considered materials. Experimental, in field, validations have also been performed.

[1]  Salvatore Baglio,et al.  Hybrid tactile probe for damage detection and material recognition , 2003, SPIE Smart Structures and Materials + Nondestructive Evaluation and Health Monitoring.

[2]  Giovanni Muscato,et al.  Tactile measuring systems for the recognition of unknown surfaces , 2002, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas..

[3]  A. K. Sinha,et al.  Detection of Landmines , 2000 .

[4]  D. Antonic,et al.  Method for Determining Classification Significant Features from Acoustic Signature of Mine-like Buried Objects , 2000 .

[5]  Shigeo Hirose,et al.  Development of Mine Hands: Extended Prodder for Protected Demining Operation , 2005, Auton. Robots.

[6]  Giovanni Muscato,et al.  OUTDOOR VALIDATION OF AN INTELLIGENT PRODDER FOR HUMANITARIAN DEMINING WITH A MOBILE MANIPULATOR , 2014 .

[7]  Akira Kimoto,et al.  A New Multifunctional Tactile Sensor for Detection of Material Hardness , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement.

[8]  Kaspar Althoefer,et al.  Surface material recognition through haptic exploration using an intelligent contact sensing finger , 2012, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[9]  A. K. Sinha,et al.  Detection of landmines (Review Paper) , 2001 .

[10]  Alvise Sartori,et al.  THE EXPLODET PROJECT : ADVANCED NUCLEAR TECHNIQUES FOR HUMANITARIAN DEMINING , 1999 .

[11]  Giovanni Muscato,et al.  Robots and sensors for HUDEM at University of CATANIA : Mobile robotics: Climbing and walking robots , 1999 .

[12]  Davor Antonić.  Analysis and Interpretation of Ultrasonic Prodder Signal , 2003 .

[13]  Emil M. Petriu,et al.  High sampling resolution tactile sensor for object recognition , 1993, 1993 IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference.

[14]  Lino Marques,et al.  Multisensor Demining Robot , 2005, Auton. Robots.

[15]  C. Chuang,et al.  Flexible piezoelectric tactile sensor with structural electrodes array for shape recognition system , 2008, 2008 3rd International Conference on Sensing Technology.

[16]  L. Cantelli,et al.  A novel smart prodder with sensor feedback for material recognition in Humanitarian Demining applications , 2014, IEEE SENSORS 2014 Proceedings.

[17]  James Trevelyan.  Statistical Analysis and Experiments in Manual Demining , 2003 .

[18]  Koh Hosoda,et al.  Robust material discrimination by a soft anthropomorphic finger with tactile and thermal sense , 2008, 2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[19]  A. Kimoto,et al.  A Multifunctional Tactile Sensor Based on PVDF Films for Identification of Materials , 2010, IEEE Sensors Journal.

[20]  Kenneth M. Dawson-Howe,et al.  The detection of buried landmines using probing robots , 1998, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[21]  S. Graziani,et al.  A Resonant Vibrating Tactile Probe for Biomedical Applications Based on IPMC , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement.

[22]  Jun Ishikawa,et al.  Anti-personnel Landmine Detection for Humanitarian Demining , 2009 .

[23]  L. Cantelli,et al.  A survey on instrumented prodding techniques for landmine recognition , 2013 .