The COMRADE System for Multirobot Autonomous Landmine Detection in Postconflict Regions

We consider the problem of autonomous landmine detection using a team of mobile robots. Previous research on robotic landmine detection mostly employs a single robot equipped with a landmine detection sensor to detect landmines. We envisage that the quality of landmine detection can be significantly improved if multiple robots are coordinated to detect landmines in a cooperative manner by incrementally fusing the landmine-related sensor information they collect and to then use that information to visit locations of potential landmines. Towards this objective, we describe a multi-robot system called COMRADES to address different aspects of the autonomous landmine detection problem including distributed area coverage to detect and locate landmines, information aggregation to fuse the sensor information obtained by different robots, and, multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) to enable different robots determine a suitable sequence to visit locations of potential landmines while reducing the time required and battery expended. We have used commercially available all-terrain robots called Coroware Explorer that are customized with a metal detector to detect metallic objects including landmines, as well as indoor Corobot robots, both in simulation and in physical experiments, to test the different techniques in COMRADES.