HUMANITARIAN DEMINING ROBOT GRYPHON - CURRENT STATUS AND AN OBJECTIVE EVALUATION -

Mechanical systems or robots to assist landmine detection are expected to greatly improve quality of humanitarian demining tasks. These new systems could provide: i) safer operation; ii) advanced methods for automatic target recognition and discrimination; iii) consistent performance with less influence of "human-factors"; iv) better detection performance, i.e., higher probability of detection (POD) and lower false alarm rate (FAR); among others. However, despite many research/development efforts around the world, no practical landmine detection robot has yet achieved maturity for practical use. Nonetheless, the humanitarian demining robot Gryphon, which current status of development is described in detail, is close to meet the requirements for practical use. This paper analyses the results from latest on-site tests underwent by Gryphon in Croatia (2006, 2007) and Cambodia (2006), to make a critical and objective evaluation of its validity, and clarify the points that still require further development in order to realize a practical humanitarian demining robot.

[1]  Motoyuki Sato,et al.  Field evaluation of handheld landmine detection GPR system in Croatia , 2006 .

[2]  Jun Ishikawa,et al.  Test and evaluation of Japanese GPR-EMI dual-sensor systems at Benkovac Test Site in Croatia , 2007 .

[3]  Shigeo Hirose,et al.  Development of quadruped walking robot with the mission of mine detection and removal-proposal of shape-feedback master-slave arm , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.98CH36146).

[4]  J. P. Trevelyan.  A suspended device for humanitarian demining , 1996 .

[5]  S. Hirose,et al.  Endpoint Vibration Control of a Mobile Mine-Detecting Robotic Manipulator , 2007, 2007 American Control Conference.

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

[7]  Shigeo Hirose,et al.  A New Approach to Humanitarian Demining , 2005, Auton. Robots.

[9]  Surya P. N. Singh,et al.  Bias-tolerant terrain following method for a field deployed manipulator , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[10]  K. Furuta,et al.  Evaluation of Test Results of GPR-based Anti-personnel Landmine Detection Systems Mounted on Robotic Vehicles , 2005 .

[11]  Nobuhiro Shimoi,et al.  Development of teleoperated six-legged walking robot for mine detection and mapping of mine field , 2000, Proceedings. 2000 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2000) (Cat. No.00CH37113).

[12]  DebenestPaulo,et al.  A New Approach to Humanitarian Demining. Part 2 , 2005 .