Demining



This work develops key technologies for de-mining a target region, whether it be in shallow water, on land, or at the interface between them. The crucial first step of de-mining is finding the mines. Searching for mines is a dangerous and expensive task. The use of robots immediately bypasses the danger, reduces the cost, and potentially speeds the process. In de-mining, a robot must pass a mine-detecting sensor over all points in the region that might conceal a mine. To do this, the robot must traverse a carefully planned path through the target region. The goal of this work is to develop intelligent algorithms that guarantee that the robot completely covers the target region, or portions of the region with a high concentration of targets. This effort also emphasizes that intelligent algorithms do not necessarily require a high computational budget, and thus can operate on inexpensive outdoor mobile robots. Therefore, we are developing new inexpensive outdoor mobile robots and encoding our algorithms on these mechatronic systems.