Hybrid deliberative/reactive control of a scanning system for landmine detection

Antipersonnel mines infest fields all over the world. According to recent estimates, landmines are killing and maiming more than 2000 innocent civilians per month. The problem of landmine detection and removal requires the cooperation of a number of engineering fields, which in turn poses a need for new technologies, such as improved sensors, efficient manipulators and mobile robots. This paper describes the configuration and control architecture of a scanning manipulator for detecting antipersonnel landmines. The scanning system is part of a demining system based on a walking robot that acts as the carrier for the scanning manipulator. Broadly speaking, the scanning system consists of a sensor head that can detect certain kinds of landmines and, to move the sensor head over large areas, a manipulator that has been appropriately sensorized to scan irregular terrains in the presence of obstacles. The proposed control architecture is of the hybrid deliberative/reactive type: A deliberative controller defines a sweep trajectory that furnishes complete coverage of the infested area, while two reactive controllers are involved in on-line adaptation to the environment. Experiments show good performance of the whole system. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.