Development of a high-mobility wheeled robot for humanitarian mine clearance

Antipersonal mines kill or mutilate tens of people every day. Military mine clearance methods make use of heavy vehicles and cannot achieve a satisfying destruction percentage. Consequently, humanitarian deminers use the classical manual methods. This work is very tedious, dangerous and costly. The detection is not always reliable and is very slow. Improvements can be made by developing new sensors and by automating the detection sequence. The Robotics workgroup of the Belgian Hudem '97 project focuses on the development of low cost vehicles that could be equipped with mine detectors. In this paper, we first review the main characteristics of such platforms. We then show that the architecture of the vehicle is also determined by the chosen detection strategy. Afterwards, we describe in detail the original wheeled vehicle we are building. Its main characteristic is a very high mobility given by the 3 drive/steer wheels. The low-level control is made by a microcontroller, while paths are generated by the remote computer. Preliminary indoor test have demonstrated the potentialities of this vehicle.