06-04-2012, 04:53 PM
A MULTI-ROBOT SYSTEM FOR LANDMINE DETECTION
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Introduction
Despite the general awareness on the amount of landmines
laid down around the globe, end-user's needs for
new technologies must be properly assessed in order to
avoid the waste of nancial funds, which could be better
applied in other vital parts of the process, such as manual
demining. Hence, R&D in Humanitarian Demining
should be focused on sustainable demining that means it
must take into account the socio-economic impact of its
results. Bringing formerly mined land back to their landlords
involves much more than landmines removal activities
(demining). This is the reason why this global process
is known as Mine Action rather than Humanitarian Demining.
Technology Review in Humanitarian Demining
Humanitarian Demining has been often cited as a potential
application for many research elds (e.g multirobot
systems, digital signal processing, machine learning,
control systems, multi-agent systems, etc.). However,
end-users real needs are seldom taken into account.
The AMI-02 project intends to close the gap between endusers
and the research community by developing sustainable
technology.
Architecture
This section describes the conceptual view of the
project. The parts which have been already implemented
are explicitly referred to in sections 4, 5 and 6.
Multi-Agent System Support
Figure 2 depicts the multi-agent system architecture,
which is split into three layers: (1) the human agents layer
that provides interfaces with the end-user, experts and operator;
(2) the software agents layer that congures, maintains,
and exploits the robots by interacting with the upper
layer; (3) the physical layer, where robots lay.
The Control System
This section describes the control system. The architecture
described in the previous section is not yet fully
implemented, which is expected only at the end of the
project. However, those parts related to the control solution
that have been already implemented are going to be
addressed in this section.
Mission Control
Figure 5 illustrates the server front-end, which is implemented
in Java so it can be ported to any platform.
Currently, it is running on a Linux based laptop. This
software allows the user to both design and supervise a
mission. In addition, if required, the user can also teleoperate
the robots (see gure 6 for a snapshot of the teleoperation
front end).
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
The relevance of technology transfer, from Humanitarian
Demining to other domains, has been the drive to approach
other solutions other than ground vehicles, such
as unmanned helicopters. The problem of unmanned helicopters
control has been intensively studied in the last
few years, mostly around aggressive manoeuvring (see
[18] for a survey).
The Mechanical Systems
This section describes the current status of our mobile
platforms from the mechanical point of view (refer to [7]
for a detailed description). Some different types of locomotion
have been tested, each one with its advantages and
disadvantages. The strength of a multi-robot system, is
to have heterogeneous robots cooperating for a common
goal: to analyse the soil and identify landmines.
Conclusions
This paper describes part of the work being carried out
by the Portuguese SME IntRoSys within the project AMI-
02, which is being supported by the Portuguese Ministry
of Defence and whose main target is the development of
a heterogeneous Multi-Robot System for Humanitarian
Demining. The multiagent based architecture to support
the demining process was outlined and its main parts described.
After that the robots main control aspects and
their main mechanical features were described.