Design and implementation of multi-sensor based autonomous minesweeping robot

Abstract

The scope of this paper is to introduce the architecture of a minesweeping robot which is designed and implemented as a research project. Reduction of the human activities in dangerous environment is the first objective of employing the autonomous mobile robots in many applications. Mine detection is a risky action that can be done by either human or robot. Aria Robot is an autonomous four wheels robot that is designed to search through an arbitrary minefield for detecting landmines. Wireless connection is established between the local controller on the robot and general controller that is installed at the outside of the minefield to handle the whole navigation procedure. A personal computer (PC) acts as the general controller which is responsible for mapping the landmines and determining some general settings for local controller. The local controller navigates the robot based on the feedbacks from several sensors to detect the barriers and landmines such as digital compass, optical shaft encoder, current sensor, ultrasonic range finder sensors, infrared (IR) sensor and mine detector sensor.