Teleoperated Buggy Vehicle and Weight Balanced Arm for Mechanization of Mine Detection and Clearance Tasks

The development of a practical mobile robot system for mechanization of humanitarian demining tasks such as sensing/verification and/or clearance of anti-personnel landmines is close to be completed. The system proposed by Hirose group at Tokyo Tech is a simple but effective solution that consists of a pantographic weight-balanced manipulator mounted on top of a mobile platform. A practical and versatile mobile platform has been successfully realized by converting a commercial 4wheel buggy for remote-operation. Nonetheless, it still preserves the characteristics of the original buggy, and can conveniently serve as a commuting vehicle for the human worker as well. On the other hand, the manipulator mounted on the buggy is a complete new type of manipulator especially designed for the landmine detection and removal tasks. It adopts a new weightcompensated configuration consisting of 4 links and 5 nodes pantographic linkage. This manipulator can be equipped with many types of sensors to detect landmines and also has the capability to equip grass cutter, prodders and other tools if so required. For the short term in particular, this research is focused on the sensing tasks. For this purpose, mine sensors composed of metal detector and ground penetrating radar has been tested. Furthermore, automatic topographical mapping generation and scanning of the terrain has also been implemented using stereo-vision cameras mounted on the manipulator link. This automation relieves the human-operators from the burden of watching all the scanning process which can be long and demanding. Nonetheless, the operator can switch to manual scanning and teleoperate the manipulator whenever it is necessary. In this paper the authors explain the system main concepts and give details of its main composing parts. The validity and usefulness of the proposed system are demonstrated by real experimental results.