A Multi-Robot System for Landmine Detection

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a multi-robot system for area reduction in humanitarian demining. In spite of the specific requirements imposed to the work being carried out by the humanitarian demining domain, the results being achieved can also be used in other domains such as surveillance and remote monitoring. A multi-agent based architecture is responsible for coordinating a progressive stochastic analysis of the terrain. The all-terrain navigation used by the mobile robots is attained by a novel embodied reactive obstacle avoidance method. A control mission software has been developed to plan, configure and supervise the operations. Highly compliant legged and wheeled platforms have been developed accomplishing low-cost all-terrain robots. Digital signal processing algorithms have been applied for landmine detection using the payload sensors.