Humanitarian Robotics: Autonomous Landmine Detection Rover

Although war is not happening, the dangerous impact is still tangible today. Landmine has been one of the threats left by the past wars, killing 15,000–20,000 people every year according to UN Mine Action Service. Demining efforts cost US$ 300–1000 per mine and imposing danger to people, resulting one person is killed and two are injured for every mines cleared.

HRATC 2017

Robot can be really helpful in solving this problem, as it is designed to do the “dull, dirty, dangerous, and difficult” tasks. In 2017, IEEE Robotics Automation Society’s Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology (RAS–SIGHT) held a competition. The competition was Humanitarian Robotics and Automation Technology Challenge (HRATC), held at the 2017 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA’17).

Autonomous Landmine Detection Rover

Programming for Robotics – ROS: Exercise 3

This post is a continuation of previous project, on learning ROS. The lecture and exercise is given by Robotic Systems Lab. – ETH Zurich, can be accessed through this website.

This time, the exercise goal is to make the robot hit the pillar in the simulation environment. The pillar position is found by measuring closest distance from LIDAR measurement. The speed is set to be constant and a simple P controller is made to direct Husky towards the pillar. Both speed and P-gain is written in param file, making it easy to tune avoiding re-build the code. A marker in RViz is created to visualize location of the pillar.

Exercise 3

The video above shows my result for the exercise. You can find the exercise paper sheet on this link.

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Thanks to Robotic Systems Lab – ETH Zurich for sharing this helpful course!