Marwa: A Rough Terrain Landmine Detection Robot For Low Budgets

Mechanically efficient and innovatively designed robots equipped with reliable detection techniques can not only help in greatly reducing the time needed to clear an area inflicted with land-mines but also reduce the life threats to individual deminers. However, prohibitive costs and reliability issues have thus far been hindering the wide scale deployment of robotic technologies in this area, especially in poorer countries of the world. Recently, we have demonstrated the deployment of an extremely low cost yet robust robot landmine detector that can achieve autonomous affordable mine detection by smaller government and private organizations. We have produced a design which is extreme in simplicity, in the sense that it can be indigenously produced, deployed and maintained in a developing world country by small budget organizations using commercial off-theshelf (COTS) components. Taking advantage of the slow nature of mine detection tasks, we have been able to achieve performance levels at par with sophisticated robotic solutions by an emphasis on mechanical simplicity (double Ackermann steering with a 5 DOF sensor arm), adaptation of off-the-shelf sensors for map building and navigation (RGB-D sensors and custom-built stereo vision), open source software architectures (Robot Operating System (ROS) on standard PC) and modular rapid-prototyping hardware for electronics and control (NI’s singleboard RIO controllers under LabView). We outline some main components of the robot design in this paper including mechanical design, coverage and scanning strategies, visual servoing of the mechanical arm and mapping & localization algorithms to enable navigation in rough outdoor terrains. Finally, we comment on how this effort provides insights into developing field robotics application in and for developing world scenarios.