Humanitarian demining aims at clearing landmine affected areas, but the current manual demining techniques are still slow, costly and dangerous. Discrimination methods for distinguishing between real mines and metal fragments would greatly increase efficiency of such demining operations, but none practical solution has been implemented yet. Important information for discrimination are the depth which targets are buried, so estimation methods of this physical property are desired. In this research, a new, accurate and fast method based on Spatially Represented Metal Mine Detector Signals for estimating metallic targets depths using Metal Mine Detectors is presented, which takes advantage of high precision scanning of the minefield using robotic manipulator.
Mechanical systems or robots are designed to support human operators during complex and dangerous tasks such as demining operations. Even though the robot Gryphon was created to automate these operations, some of its tasks still rely greatly on the human operator, who has few or no assisting tools to perform efficient decisions. During the landmine detection and marking task in special, the operator is totally responsible for analyzing the scanned data and pointing the potential targets, which makes the system performance unstable and vulnerable to human factors. This article proposes an automatic method for finding potential targets, which the operator has the simple role of accepting or not the decisions taken by the automatic method. Experimental results showed that time duration, POD and FAR were greatly improved compared to the former methods.
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