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Air Drones for Explosive Landmines Detection

  • Conference paper
ROBOT2013: First Iberian Robotics Conference

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 253))

Abstract

Explosive landmines have cost the lives of hundreds in several countries. This paper presents a field report of a low cost unmanned aerial vehicle -ARdrone 2.0- used as a complemented tool for landmine visual detection in rural scenarios. The main contribution of this work is the practical experimentation with an integrated tool. This tool is composed by the ARdrone quadrotor and a base station for monitoring the mission. Based on visual feedback from the onboard camera, algorithms for landmine detection are applied. Experiments have been carried out to quantify the performance of the platform by means of measuring the percentage of the detection at different set of flight speeds and altitudes. The goal is not only to detect fully visible landmines but also those partially buried. It has been observed an effective percentage of the detection over 80% when flying at low altitudes about 1m from the ground at speeds up to 2.2ms − 1. The visual methods introduced herein might enable the ARdrone quadrotor to be used as a low-cost autonomous platform for safe area coverage applied to landmine detection in real scenarios.

This work was supported by the SIRP group at the School of Engineering of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia. First and second authors have equally contributed in this research. First author is a researcher at SIRP with interest in control, artificial intelligence and vision applied to robotics. Second author is a researcher at SIRP with interest in aerial robotics, control and aeronautics.

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Correspondence to C. Castiblanco .

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Castiblanco, C., Rodriguez, J., Mondragon, I., Parra, C., Colorado, J. (2014). Air Drones for Explosive Landmines Detection. In: Armada, M., Sanfeliu, A., Ferre, M. (eds) ROBOT2013: First Iberian Robotics Conference. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 253. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03653-3_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03653-3_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-03652-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-03653-3

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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