MINES EXPLORER CLOUD NETWORKED ROBOTS
developer@Manish Kumar
Keywords— Cloud Robotics, Hexapod, Mecnr, Mines
Explorer Robot, Swarm Robotics, Autonomous Robot.
Abstract—The project is on an autonomous hexapod shaped robot which can move around the area prone to land mines and other explosives to explore them and send the sensed data to the cloud at the same time as a warning. Since a hexapod has many degrees of freedom its movement can be made highly precise. The robot is attached with many peripheral sensors to record the object of interest data and those data are transmitted to a remote machine where the entire decision making algorithm runs. That remote machine can also do the statistical analysis of the collected data. The final decision is transmitted to the robot via the same communication link to the on board microcontroller for the associated movement. The usage of cloud computation is to make the sensor data available all the time and also possible to share it.
The world is immensely suffered from land mines in many countries. Each day, around the world, 70 people die as a result of landmines. The vast majority of these victims are innocent civilians, mostly women and children. Millions more are held hostage by these hidden killers, afraid to venture from their homes, unable to plant their fields, or even walk to school or to the clinic. Land mines are controversial because they remain dangerous after the conflict in which they were deployed, killing and injuring civilians and rendering land impassable and unusable for decades. The UN estimates that with current technology, it will take nearly 1,100 years to clear all the mines in the world. From this motivation we got an idea to make a
solution with the help of embedded technology and computing on the platform of robotics. So in this solution there is a fully automatic robotic system purposed for military application to explore landmines in mines-field (and explosives at advancement) by group of robots working together with swarm behavior and notify remotely about the detected landmines under earth to the monitoring men or agency in real time. It is an autonomous 3-tier architecture system of Robots-Server-
Monitors to provide unmanned search operation of landmines (and explosives in future with capabilities of sensing, communication and self-decision making with low hardware footprint by implementing cloud computing technology to minimize costing, power consumption and hardware faults while maximizing productivity, swarm and efficiency.
Function: There will be a team of 20 to 50 identical robots sized of a rabbit and weighed less than 5kg, number of robots depends upon the search operation and human desire. When a search operation is initiated by military man, military man will have to carry the robots to the specific mines field area by any vehicle and then robots will start their search operation by the command given by a local or a remote human. At monitoring system there will be a software which will provide interface between monitoring-men and the robots via secure internet connection. Command can be executed remotely or locally depends upon military, to start the operation monitoring individuals have to define the area in the digital map which is to be explored. Software will then divide the map in grids and each grid will be connected with each robot and will calculate estimated operation completion time automatically.
Architecture: MECNR works on 3-tier architecture of Robots-Server-Military:
- At the first level, there are number of robots having intra communication among them along with swarm intelligence technology.
- At the second level, all robots are connected to a point which is connected to server via Internet. Communication among robots will be done by xbee radio. All robots will be equipped with GPS (Global Positioning System). Connection among robots and server is secure.
- At the third level, military man can access the server with respective authorization. Interface between robots and military man is simplified by application installed on cloud server providing software as a service( SaaS).
The design of the robots are so special to give capability to move in rough terrain earth surface. Any search operation in mines field can be customize depending upon the size of the area and time complexity i.e., if military wants to make an operation where area is bigger than normal and have less time to complete the operation than military can use more numbers of robots to accomplish the same in desired manner & if the area is small than small no. robots can do the search operation.
Cool Things About MECNR:
- All communication among any part of the system is secure.
- It is simple in design and architecture.
- It is light weight and small in size. It is not bulky.
- It consumes less power due to low hardware traffic and so is economical.
- Hardware footprint is very low without compromising knowledge set.
- It has unlimited data storage capacity.
- It has open source hardware and software.
- It is robust and weather proof.
- It can be monitored from anywhere in the world.
- It is 100% reliable and sophisticated.
EXISTING METHODS AND THEIR DISADVANTAGES
In present scenario, landmines search operation and
sweeping is done through various method which is
described below:
- The conventional method of landmines searching in which individuals have to go to the landmines field without having any prior knowledge of where the landmines is exactly located buried under earth as shown in above two figures. This method prominently demands risk of lives and requires human involvement.
- The Mine Kafon is a low-cost wind-powered mine detonator with the appearance of a giant, spiky-armed tumbleweed. The recycled rubber feet ensure maximum contact with the ground as the Mine Kafon tumbles with the wind across areas known or suspected to contain anti-personnel landmines but this method doesn’t ensure reliability.
- A conventional demining process in which well-trained dogs can sniff out explosive chemicals like TNT in landmines, and are used in several countries but are not reliable and costs risk and man-power.
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