Robots for Anti-Personnel Mine Search

Abstract Anti-personnel mines are blind terror weapons designed to maim. About 100 million mines have to be removed from the ground of 60 nations. Well trained dogs are efficient for localizing mines, but they tire quickly. Manual searching, by prodding the ground, is used in demining campaigns, at an average cost of $800 per neutralized mine. The purpose of this project is to design and build a light-weight semi-autonomous robot that would detect mines and mark their location for further action. The Pemex-B is a simple design with two driving wheels and a third supporting point where the mines are sensed. Navigation software has been tested on reduced-scale models. A larger model participated in the IAV'95 contest.