Field Characterization of Humanitarian Demining for Future Robotic Assessment

Land mines are noisome and indiscriminate weapons that are simple to place, but difficult to remove. On the surface, robotics is ideally suited to the tedious, challenging, and dangerous removal task. However, prior attempts at robotic clearance, while promising in the laboratory, have had limited success in the field. The demining problem is particularly challenging due to the exceptional variety of the mines, the generally unstructured terrain, and the high (>1:100) false positive rate for mine detection. This paper reviews the types of terrain encountered in humanitarian demining and presents a design framework for robot tools that takes advantage of the presence of some clear initial terrain. The design separates operational units (e.g., main motors) from potentially replaceable units (e.g., sensing or tagging). This minimizes the amount of hardware in vulnerable areas and allows critical functional units to remain in protected spaces. By reducing the need for heavily shielding, the moving mass is lighter, which makes dynamic operations, such as multiple scans, easier.