Robots for Humanitarian Demining

Abstract

More than 100,000,000 anti-personnel mines have been laid in deferent part of the world by terrorists or government forces. The mines are cheapest weapon, built to make horrible injuries, afecting active people, with major falls-of into economic growth.Therefore, after or during a war demining is a big technological problem which needs to address by the governments. All demining activities can be classiied mainly in two different ways, military demining and humanitarian demining. Main objective of military demining is to make a quick safe path for troops and may be 80% clearing is enough for them. On the other hand, humanitarian demining target is to clear 100% to ensure the use of lands by people who are not involved in the conlicts for their day-to-day activities including farming. Mainly humanitarian demining has two tasks: detection and removal. Still the use of robots is questionable in this regard. Mainly robots work well for clean and reliable tasks. When the price to performance ratio is too high, they are academic toys. This chapter presents the overview of the available robotic technologies with a depth comparison between them by considering the appropriateness to the local context.

Justification of the need to create modern robotic and technical complexes for humanitarian demining

“…Незважаючи на значну кількість наукових робіт із даної тематики, на сьогодні склалася тенденція розмежування зазначених питань [2].…”

“…Скільки б не тривала ця ганебна «специальная операция», це тільки додає страждань людям та призводить до більш масштабного забруднення ВНП території нашої багатостраждальної країни, площа яких оцінюється на сьогодні величезними масштабамидо 300 тис. км 2 . Рано чи пізно війна закінчиться та розпочнеться кропітка робота щодо гуманітарного розмінування забруднених територій, а розмінування цих територій, за різними оцінками, може тривати до кількох десятків років.…”

Eliminating Hidden Killers: How Can Technology Help Humanitarian Demining?

“…This is dangerous work that could eventually be done by machines. The dangerous process of lifting a mine could also be done by autonomous or useroperated robots in the future (Hemapala 2017). Of course, lifting pressure-operated mines must be done with extreme care, especially if the mine includes an anti-lift device or is booby trapped, e.g., with a grenade underneath whose pin has been removed so it will detonate shortly after the mine is lifted.…”

Robots and Artificial Intelligence in the Military.

“…The ground robots, used by the Army, can be employed for several land based hazardous duties. Some of these are the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) of the likes of tEoDor (Nguyen and Bott 2000), Mine Clearance of the likes of Uran-6 (Santana et al 2007;Hempala 2017), Fire-fighting both fixed and mobile of the likes of IFE Tools (Lattimer 2015;Zeng et al 2022), Combat Engineering Reconnaissance using ADSR technology (Kopulety and Palasiewicz 2018; Paleja 2023), Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) of the likes of DeepMind IMPALA (Cronin and Giarra 2010;Cook 2021;Shaikh et al 2022), transportation of heavy loads in almost any terrain, such as the four Legged Squat Support System -LS3 robot mules which were rejected by the US Army as they were noisy (Hern 2015) or the Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport, also called S-MET or MUTT (Judson 2020) or for precision shooting in all terrains, like the US Super Soldier robot (Jacobsen 2015;Emanuel et al 2019) or the Russian Iron Man (O'Neill, 2016). These varied developments are indicative of the wide range of tasks, operations and terrain these ground robots can handle.…”