Detection of Landmines Using a UAV: Architecture and Control Issues

Landmines are a constant danger causing thousands of deaths and injuries every year to soldiers, during conflicts, and to civilians, years after conflicts ceased. It has long been thought that landmine detection is an appropriate application for robotics because it is a dull, dirty and dangerous task. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the effectiveness and suitability of an Unmanned Aerial Countermine to search for, mark and report detected landmines. The intent was to provide the current military force and civilians with an effective mine detection and marking system. Our experience determined that, although accurate digital marking of landmine locations within a terrain map was useful, accurate physical marking of the mine locations was considered essential for the military and civilian requirements. In this paper we discuss the general architecture of the system, describing the required hardware and in particular the proposed sensors, starting from a ground penetrating synthetic aperture radar. We also focus our attention on the control system architecture and on the control strategy of the whole system. The main purpose of this paper is the presentation of the general problem, with an extensive analysis of the state of the art, and the general framework of the project with some major details about works in progress.