Humanitarian Demining Innovative Solutions and the Challenges of Technology Humanitarian Demining Innovative Solutions and the Challenges of Technology Edited by Maki K. Habib I-Tech Published by I-Tech Education and Publishing I-Tech Education and Publishing Vienna Austria Abstracting and non-profit use of the material is permitted with credit to the source. Statements and opinions expressed in the chapters are these of the individual contributors and not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the published articles. Publisher assumes no responsibility liability for any damage or injury to persons or property arising out of the use of any materials, instructions, methods or ideas contained inside. After this work has been published by the I-Tech Education and Publishing, authors have the right to repub- lish it, in whole or part, in any publication of which they are an author or editor, and the make other personal use of the work. © 2008 I-Tech Education and Publishing www.i-techonline.com Additional copies can be obtained from: publication@ars-journal.com First published February 2008 Printed in Croatia A catalogue record for this book is available from the Austrian Library. Humanitarian Demining, Edited by Maki K. Habib p. cm. ISBN 978-3-902613-11-0 1. Humanitarian Demining. 2. Challenges. I. Maki K. Habib V Preface Landmines (antipersonnel (AP) and anti-tanks mines) and Explosive Remnants of War (ERW), which include unexploded ordnance (UXO) and abandoned explosive ordnance, represent a major threat to civilian. United Nation Department of Hu- man Affairs (UNDHA) assesses that there are more than 100 million mines that are scattered across the world and pose significant hazards in more than 68 countries. The international Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimates that the casualty rate from landmines currently exceeds 26,000 persons every year. It is estimated that more than 800 persons are killed and 1,200 maimed each month by landmines around the world. The primary victims are unarmed civilians and among them children are particularly affected. Worldwide, there are some 300,000-400,000 landmine survivors and this number is increasing. Survivors face terrible physical, psychological and socio-economic consequences. Landmines undermine peace and stability in whole regions by displacing people and inhibiting the use of land for production while subjecting people life to a continuous danger. Besides this, the medical, social, economic, and environmental consequences are immense. Humanitarian demining demands that all the landmines (especially AP mines) and ERW affecting the places where ordinary people live must be cleared, and their safety in areas that have been cleared must be guaranteed. The canonical ap- proach to humanitarian demining aims to have efficient tools that can accurately detect, locate and deactivate/remove every single landmine and other UXO as fast and as reliable and safe as possible while keeping cost to a minimum level. Any in- strument for this process must be 100% reliable for the safety of the operators and the people whom will use the cleared land. The efficient fulfillment of such task with high reliability represents vital prerequisites for any region to recover from landmines and associated battlefield debris by making land safer and allows peo- ple to use it without fear. However, the problem associated with humanitarian demining is characterized by an enormous variability in the nature of explosive ordnance to be removed, climate diversity, and in the type of terrain and vegetation. The terrain to be cleared in- cludes everything from jungle to deserts to mountainsides and every kind of cli- mate. The variety of mines being used is enormous, including many fabricated from sophisticated non-metallic materials. Humanitarian demining is complicated by the fact that unused land for several years in most portions of the world will be VI covered with substantial vegetation, which makes it impossible to see the ground or to move the detection/clearing equipment freely above the ground. The solution to this problem is very difficult because, given the nature of landmines, the associ- ated problems and the demand for high standards in terms of accuracy and reli- ability. In addition, landmines are infesting some of the world's poorest countries, where the indigenous personnel available to undertake demining may lack techni- cal skills, experience and education. Although demining has been given top prior- ity, currently mine’s detection and clearing operations are a labor-intensive, slow, very dangerous, expensive, and low technology operations. Hence, it becomes ur- gent to develop detection (individual mine, and area mine detection), identification and removal technologies and creative techniques to reduce false alarms, increase efficiency of demining operations to achieve a substantial reduction to the threat of landmines within a reasonable timeframe and at an affordable cost. Traditional military countermine techniques and equipment are not directly applicable to humanitarian demining, largely because the philosophy and the standards for successful clearance are different. Technology has become the solution to many long-standing problems, and while current mine detection and clearance technologies may be effective, it is far too limited to fully address the huge complex and difficult landmine problem facing the world. No single approach or technology will soon emerge to offer the complete solution to the landmine crisis. The diversity of the mine threat points out to the need for different types of sensors and equipment to detect and neutralize landmines. Many experts stress the need for a tool-kit that would offer a variety of equipment, which could be combined in different ways for different situations. The challenge is in finding creative, reliable and applicable technical solutions in such highly constrained environment. Improving detection and clearance methods is a formidable technical challenge. The requirements to develop devices and equipment for use by deminers with different training, cultures, and education levels greatly add to the challenge. Greater resources need to be devoted to demining both to immediate clearance and to the development of innovated detection and clearance equipment and technolo- gies. There is an urgent need to speed up the development to have compact and portable, low cost, technically feasible, fast response, safe, accurate, reliable, and easy to operate mine detector systems that can be reliably used to detect and dis- criminate accurately all types of available landmines from all the other metal that may be in the ground and support fast and wide area coverage. Appropriate mine clearance technologies are those inexpensive, rugged, and reliable technical prod- ucts, processes and techniques that are developed within, or should be transferred for use in mine-affected areas. These technologies should be cheap enough to be purchased within the regional economy and simple enough to be made and main- tained in a small workshop. We should favor technologies that can be manufac- VII tured in mined countries; technologies that are transferable, and which provide employment and economic infrastructure where it is most urgently required. Developing and applying technology to humanitarian demining is a stimulating objective. To increase mine clearance daily performance by improving productivity and accuracy, and to increase safety of demining operations and personnel, there is a need for an efficient, reliable and cost effective humanitarian mine action equip- ment with flexible and modular mechanisms, adaptable mobility and equipped with some level of decision making capabilities. Most people in the mine clearance community would be delighted if the work could be done remotely through teleoperated systems or, even better, autonomously through the use of service ro- bots. Searching and removing AP mines seems to be a perfect application for ro- bots. However, this need to have a good understanding of the problem and a care- ful analysis must filter the goals in order to avoid deception and increase the possibility of achieving results. Many efforts have been recognized to develop ef- fective multi operational mode robots for the purpose to offer flexible, cheap and fast solutions. It is important to remind ourselves that there is little value in a sys- tem that makes life safer for the operators but will be less effective at clearing accu- rately and reliably the ground. In order to approach proper and practical solutions for the problem, there is a need for the scientists in each discipline and deminers in the field to share their knowledge and the results of their experience and experiments in order to design and test viable solutions for humanitarian demining. Systematic engagement is needed among organizations and members of the demining community. Technologies to be developed should take into account the facts that many of the demining operators will have had minimal formal education and that the countries where the equipment is to be used have poor technological infrastructure for equipment maintenance, operation and deployment. Innovative solutions and technologies are required and hence this book is coming out to address and deal with the problems, difficulties, priorities, development of sensing and demining technologies and the technological and research challenges. This book reports on the state of the art research and development findings and re- sults. The content of the book has been structured into three technical research sec- tions with total of 16 chapters written by well recognized researchers in the field worldwide. The main topics of these three technical research sections are: Humani- tarian Demining: the Technology and the Research Challenges (Chapters 1 and 2), Sensors and Detection Techniques for Humanitarian Demining (Chapters 3 to 8), and Robotics and Flexible Mechanisms for Humanitarian Demining respectively (Chapter3 9 to 16). VIII Finally, I hope the readers of this book will enjoy its reading and find it useful to enhance their understanding about the problems and difficulties associated with Humanitarian Demining, and helps them to contribute to humanity and initiate new research in the field to help mankind. Prof. Dr. Maki K. Habib Graduate School of Science and Engineering Saga University, Japan maki@ieee.org IX Contents Preface V Section I Humanitarian Demining: the Technology and the Research Challenges 1. Humanitarian Demining: The Problem, Difficulties, Priorities, Demining Technology and the Challenge for Robotics 001 Maki K. Habib 2. Research Challenges 057 James Trevelyan Section II Sensors and Detection Techniques for Humanitarian Demining 3. Mine-suspected Area Reduction Using Aerialand Satellite Images 069 Acheroy Marc and Yvinec Yann 4. Multi-sensor Data Fusion Based on Belief Functions and Possibility Theory: Close Range Antipersonnel Mine Detection and Remote Sensing Mined Area Reduction 095 Nada Milisavljevic, Isabelle Bloch and Marc Acheroy 5. Resonance and Nonlinear Seismo-Acoustic Land Mine Detection 121 Dimitri M. Donskoy 6. GPR Environmental-Based Landmine Automatic Detection 151 Zakarya Zyada, Yasuhiro Kawai, Shinsuke Sato, Takayuki Matsuno, Yasuhisa Hasegawa and Toshio Fukuda 7. Vehicle Mounted Dual Sensor: SAR-GPR 175 Motoyuki Sato, Kazunori Takahashi, Takao Kobayashi, Jun Fujiwara and Xuan Feng 8. Humanitarian Demining Using an Insect Based Chemical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle 191 Sergi Bermúdez i Badia1 and Paul F.M.J. Verschure Section III Robotics and Flexible Mechanisms for Humanitarian Demining 9. Development of Deminer-Assisting Robotic Tools at Tokyo Institute of Technology 219 Marc Freese, Paulo Debenest, Edwardo F. Fukushima and Shigeo Hirose X 10. Mine Detection Robot and Related Technologies for Humanitarian Demining 235 Kenzo Nonami, Seiji Masunaga, Daniel Waterman, Hajime Aoyama and Yoshihiro Takada 11. Developments on an Affordable Robotic System for Humanitarian Demining 263 Pedro Santana, Luís Correia and José Barata 12. Some Robotic Approaches and Technologies for Humanitarian Demining 289 Stefan Havlík 13. Land Robotic Vehicles for Demining 316 Stefan Havlík 14. PEACE : An Excavation-Type Demining Robot for Anti-Personnel Mines 327 Yoshikazu Mori 15. A Human-Animal-Robot Cooperative System for Anti-Personal Mine Detection 347 Thrishantha Nanayakkara, Tharindu Dissanayake, Prasanna Mahipala and K. A. Gayan Sanjaya 16. Power Tillers for Demining in Sri Lanka: Participatory Design of Low-cost Technology 367 Cepolina Emanuela Elisa [...]... soften the ground to the point where even a child's footstep will set them off Trip-wires may be caught up in overgrown bushes, grass or roots In addition, there is no accurate estimate on the size of the contaminated land and the number of mines laid in it 4 Humanitarian Demining and the Challenge of Technology The diversity of the mine threat points out to the need for different types of sensors and. .. distance from the cab, again to protect the driver in the event of detonation by offsetting the seat of explosion The crucial difficulty was how to avoid detonating the mine and thereby avoid destroying or damaging the detecting vehicle The solution was to house the wheels of Pookie with the widest and softest tires available, such as Formula One racing tires, to give the Pookie a low pressure they exert... deal of research and development has gone into motorized mechanical mine clearance in which their early design was influenced by the military demining requirements The use of such machines aims to unearth mines or force them to explode under the pressure of heavy machinery and associated tools and to avoid the necessity of deminers 10 Humanitarian Demining: Innovative Solutions and the Challenges of. .. proper and practical solutions for the problem, there is a need for the scientists in each discipline and deminers to share their knowledge and the results of their experience and experiments in order to design and test viable solutions for humanitarian demining Technologies to be developed should take into account the facts that many of the demining operators will have had minimal formal education and. .. to detect and neutralize landmines The requirements to develop equipment for use by deminers with different training levels, cultures, and education levels greatly add to the challenge The solution to this problem is very difficult because, given the nature of landmines and the requirements of humanitarian demining, as any instrument must be 100% reliable for the safety of the operators and the people... environmental and operational considerations when developed, c) Enhance the safety of deminers by providing them with suitable protective clothing, tools and equipment and isolate them as possible from direct physical contact with the mines and UXOs, Humanitarian Demining: the Problem, Difficulties, Priorities, Demining Technology and the Challenge for Robotics d) 15 Enhance the performance of the sensors and the. .. methods that is reliable and accurate in ensuring that there is no residual mines within an area declared clear of mines In order to approach a proper and practical solutions for the problem, there is a need for the scientists in each discipline and deminers to share their knowledge, and the result of their experience and experiments in order to design and test viable solutions for humanitarian demining... inexpensive and easy to use with minimal training by locals In addition, the equipment must be flexible and modular to address a variety of clearance tasks and for case-by-case scenarios Furthermore, the logistical support of the equipment must be consistent with third world countries 16 Humanitarian Demining: Innovative Solutions and the Challenges of Technology 8 Robotics and Humanitarian Demining: The. .. procedure The problem resides primarily in the detection phase first, and then how to increase productivity by speeding up demining process reliably and safely 3 Landmine Detection and Clearance: The Difficulties Landmines are harmful because of their unknown positions and often difficult to detect The development of new demining technologies is difficult because of the tremendous diversity 6 Humanitarian. .. Solutions developed for the military are generally not suitable for humanitarian demining Humanitarian demining is a critical first step for reconstruction of post-conflict countries and it requires that the entire land area to be free of mines and hence the need to detect, locates, uncover and removes reliably and safely every single mine, and other ERW from a targeted ground The aim of humanitarian demining . estimate on the size of the contaminated land and the number of mines laid in it. 4. Humanitarian Demining and the Challenge of Technology The diversity of the mine threat points out to the need. employed. There exists about 2000 types of landmines Humanitarian Demining: Innovative Solutions and the Challenges of Technology 2 around the world; among these, there are more than 650 types of. Humanitarian Demining Innovative Solutions and the Challenges of Technology Humanitarian Demining Innovative Solutions and the Challenges of Technology