Development of a behaviour-based control and software architecture for a visually guided mine detection robot

Humanitarian demining is a labor-intensive and high-risk which could benefit from the development of a humanitarian mine detection robot, capable of scanning a minefield semiautomatically. The design of such an outdoor autonomous robots requires the consideration and integration of multiple aspects: sensing, data fusion, path and motion planning and robot control embedded in a control and software architecture. This paper focuses on three main aspects of the design process: visual sensing using stereo and image motion analysis, design of a behaviour-based control architecture and implementation of a modular software architecture.