Background Information

The motivation behind our proposal for an autonomous ground based robot is the detection and removal/deactivation of land mines.

According to CNN, a land mine explodes every twenty-two minutes maiming or killing 26,000 people a year, of which most are women and children who happen to live in former war zones. By current estimates , there are more than one-hundred ten million land mines in existence in the world today. At the current pace, it would take thirty-three billion dollars and eleven centuries to clear away all the land mines. A land mine costs on the order of three to thirty dollars to make, while conversely it takes about three-hundred to three-thousand dollars to find and clear a minefield. To make matters worse, modern land mines are being made of plastic, making them almost impossible to detect.

Land mines have obviously proven to be a very deadly and difficult problem in many countries with no easy solution. The labor and high cost of finding and clearing a minefield makes the opportunity to find an inexpensive solution a wise avenue to pursue. Additionally, given the inherent risks in land mine detection, finding willing volunteers is also something of a problem. It would seem that some autonomous platform would be in order. We propose to pursue such an avenue and build such a small, unmanned, and inexpensive autonomous vehicle to seek out and remove and/or deactivate land mines.
 

Source: CNN, http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9710/10/land.mines/
Source: Land mines estimate, http://www.unicef.org/sowc96/9ldmines.htm

http://scout.sdsu.edu/about.html

Objectives & Goals

The objectives set by Endeavor Robotics for the autonomous ground based robot is as follows:

• To design, fabricate, and document, the respective subsystems of the autonomous ground based robot. These are to include, but are not limited, to the following subsystems:
  • Chassis system
  • Motor controlling system
  • Power system
  • Processing system
  • Sensor system
• To test and integrate each subsystem into a working autonomous ground based robot.
• To have the robot traverse an obstacle course under its own power and judgment.
• To design a robot to complete the obstacle course at the quickest and most efficient possible method.
• To locate and disable mines in a dedicated minefield region.