Using Walking Robots for Humanitarian De-mining Tasks

Detection and removal of antipersonnel landmines is an important world-wide concern. A huge number of landmines have been deployed during the last twenty years and demining will take several more decades, assuming the topic that no more mines are going to be deployed in the future. An adequate mine clearance rate requires the use of new technologies such as improved sensors, efficient manipulators and mobile robots. This paper presents some basic ideas about the configuration of a mobile system to detect and locate antipersonnel landmines in an efficient and effective way. This paper describes the main features of the global system that consists of: a sensor head able to detect some kind of landmines; a manipulator to move the sensor head over large areas; a locating system based on a global positioning system, a remote supervisor computer and a legged robot used as a carrier of the referred subsystems. The whole system has been configured to work on a semi-autonomous mode taking care on robot mobility and energy efficiency, as well.