Abstract:
Landmines remain as a significant barrier to economic and social development for more
than sixty countries including Sri Lanka. Once a conflict comes to an end, the areas where
landmines have been laid have to be cleared for human re-settlement. Demining is an
operation accompanied with a lot of risk to human deminers. Analysis of the actions of
the human deminers shows that some of them could be more easily and safely performed
by robotic systems. From this perspective these robotic systems appear to have an
important role to play in finding and removing millions of landmines from around the
world.
This thesis proposes a novel algorithm for multi-robot collaboration for landmine search
operations. The challenge is to enable robots to work together in an intelligent manner to
detect landmines as fast as possible. Collaboration among robots is based on a
decentralized approach in which robots are based on a set of behaviors; such behaviors
are designed to increase global performance and are based in local information and shared
information from other team members whenever they ere within the range of
communication. Landmine search method is improved using the prior knowledge about
landmine field.
The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated using extensive simulation studies.
Result shows that collaboration of robotic agents and use of information about mine fields
reduces the landmines search time dramatically.
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