Motion planning for autonomous landmine detection and clearance robots

Abstract

Demining or mine clearing is the process of detecting and removing land mine from an area. Uncleared landmines represent a major humanitarian and economic threat in over 70 countries. Its victims suffer from permanent disability if not killed and require horrific expensive care. Also, the cost of the land, roads, and underground resources that remains useless. Clearing mines is very dangerous work. The majority of demining work is still carried out manually using metal detectors and prodders. For every 5,000 mines that are removed, one person is killed and two people are injured. Over the years there has been considerable interest within the scientific and engineering communities in the application of advanced technologies to improve the safety and efficiency of this work. In this paper a motion-planning algorithm to enable landmine detection and clearing robots to systematically scan a minefield, detect landmines and clear it is presented. The algorithm works on two steps; (1) generate the driving tracks that can be used to scan the minefield area, and (2) connect these tracks using Dubins' path in order to generate a continues and complete trajectory which can be used for the robot's navigation. The inputs to the algorithm are the coordinates of the outer boundaries of the minefield's vertices, the operating width of the robot, the minimum turning radius of the robot/autonomous vehicle, the required (or optimized) driving angle in the field, and the robot's entrance point to the minefield. The output is a trajectory that consists of the coordinates of a number of headland paths connected using Dubins' curves and a set of parallel tracks covering the entire minefield area connected using Dubins' curves. The resultant trajectory enables the robot to scan the minefield area in the shortest time in a way that prevents missing any landmine by scanning the entire field area. It also enables the robot to work fully autonomous with minimal or without human intervention at all and therefore it dramatically reduces risks of workplace injury and maximize operation efficiency.