Landmine detection and removal is a challenging field for researchers. In demining operations, the phase of Area Reduction is very important in infected regions with Landmines, ERW (Explosive Remnants of War) and UXO (Unexploded Ordnances). This phase has a significant impact on the vegetation removal cost and field preparation for other demining operations. Manual operation is very dangerous, exhaustive and costive (time and money). It is very important to produce assistive mechanisms like Robots to cope with the landmine fields’ environment. One of the required design constraints of a robot is its contact pressure with ground in order not to activate the imbedded landmines. In addition, the developed robot must be equipped with Multi-Sensors system to detect the imbedded landmines when scanning the infected areas. This thesis consists of four main chapters with a literature survey of Egypt Landmine Problem in Chapter 1 and Appendices. Based on this survey, the mobile robot basic design requirements are given in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, a prototype of a mobile platform with a robot arm is developed and manufactured to satisfy these design constraints. The used mechanical components of this prototype are mainly some scrape and Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) parts available at low costs. Using such parts has significantly reduced the overall cost of the developed robot prototype. The necessary Electrical and Electronic components of developed Printed Circuit Board (PCB) used to drive and control the system DC and Stepper Motors are: Microcontrollers (AVR, PIC), control circuits, and power driver circuits. The robot is equipped with the available sensors in the Egyptian market. MATLAB Graphical User Interface (GUI) is developed to control the developed prototype via a Laptop serial port using USB (USB to serial). Variety of communication techniques and protocols are virtually tested and experimentally verified to measure to what level the design requirements are satisfied. In Chapter 4, the kinematic models of the developed robot prototype are obtained using the so called Virtual Robot Approach with the aid of Homogeneous Transformation Matrix (HTM). These models are used to simulate, in MATLAB and SIMULINK the performance of the developed robot prototype when following some desired paths in a virtual infected landmine field. A variety of control algorithms, and Fuzzy Logic techniques are considered. The Landmines locations are assumed to be known. The developed robot prototype, which is cheap, needs more sophisticated multi-sensors systems in order to be tested in real landmine fields. |
