Design and Development of a Landmines Removal Robot

Humanitarian demining is a calamity of war affecting many third world countries. Mines are cheap weapons, built to sustain horrible injuries that target active people with a knock-on effect upon economic growth. The clearing is time consuming and expensive. Clearing is an engineering duty and the humanitarian goal is a technical challenge. Advanced robotics fulfils this task cleanly and reliably on the condition that upgrades and cost are met, meaning that they lose third-world appropriateness. The challenge is to turn local machines and awareness into effective robotic aids, willingly used by the local people, and to enhance the on-going outcomes. The solution to the demining problem shall be a low cost robotic outfit with resort to nearby available resources and competences (e.g., drawn from the local agricultural machinery and know-how). This paper discusses an ongoing project that aims to develop a low-cost robot with intelligent remote-command abilities, as a cheap productivity upgrading, assembled from standard farming devices, through the shared know-how and commitment of locally involved operators. During the study, the authors have developed a low-cost robot capable of removing mines. The robot consists of modified agricultural components including its mobile carrier and the mine effector