Landmine contaminated area scanning robot
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Date
2015
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Uva Wellassa University of Sri Lanka
Abstract
Landmines pose serious threats for post conflict countries like Sri Lanka. There are nearly 120 million
landmines all over the world today. Unlike other weapons, landmines are long term killers and
function long after a war is over. It kills and maims more than 20,000 civilians per year (World Vision.
2009. About Landmines. United States: World Vision). Clearing the burial mines by human is lethal.
Though autonomous mine detecting machines are available, the cost is high and one shortage of the
systems is not providing a map of the scanned area. Therefore the percent work aim to design a
prototype of an economical autonomous robot which facilitates the mine detecting and map generating
of buried places.
Methodology
The black color marks in a white background were considered as landmines and IR sensors were used
as detectors. The complete design is consisting of detectors, carrying vehicle and controlling unit.
There are three detectors which are placing in three sides of the robot and each detector consists of
five IR sensors. The analog signals of the detector were converted in to digital by using the LM 339
comparator. The separate presets were used to adjust the reference voltage with the comparator. The
LED bulbs were placed in front of the sensors to avoid the disturbance of infra-red rays of the sunlight.
The detector of the moving side was only activated at a time and other two were deactivated in that
time.
The robot has to scan the total area and the moving pattern of the robot is the most important part and
key feature of the design. It moving on straight lines and moving perpendicular direction without
turning. The special wheel was used for this function and the wheels have cylindrical rollers to reduce
the friction when it is moving in perpendicular direction. The robot is moving by using the two pairs
of wheels. The two pairs wheels arranged in perpendicular direction and driven by gear motors. The
L 293 motor drivers were used to control the motors. The 12V 6800mAh li-ion rechargeable battery
was used as the power supply of the robot and the power transmission was done by using the L7805
regulators. The powers for the motors were supplied through the two 1000 micro farad capacitors. It
avoids the restart of the processor because of the over consumption power of the motors. The regulated
power was smooth further and given to the processor. All of the operation was processed by the
Arduino Mega at mega 2560 microprocessor. The robot is moving 1m front while scanning the area
and doing the serial communication. Then stay 1 second for stable the robot and moving 20cm
perpendicular direction and after 1 second delay it is moving back. Then again do the perpendicular
movement. The serial communication is occurring while these movements. This process is repeating
5 times again and again. The counter was used to control the repeating times of the cycle. The real
time data communication was done by serial communication and data received by a serial terminal.
The USB port was functioning as the virtual serial port. The communication port and the baud rate should be same. Baud rate can be set as the requirement. The predefined Matlab application generated
the map.
Description
Keywords
Science and Technology, Technology, Robotics, Automation, Information Science, Computer Science