Humanitarian Demining group

　It is said that 70 million unprocessed landmines have been left underground in the world now. General demining process depends on exploring land mines with a probe or a metal detector manually. However, it is not few cases that the worker suffers injure during the removal process of landmines. Then, automatically demining work by robots is expected to be applied in place of workers. Automatic detection of landmines will not only be safe but also be quick and accurate. This research is concerned with "automatic landmine detection with mobile robot".

Signal Processing of GPR acquired by Geography Adaptive Scanning

　
　This research is intended to detect landmines by Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). GPR provides a recent technique for sensing objects underground based on dielectric properties. It is useful as a nondestructive technique for plastic landmines detection, on contrast to a Metal detector (MD). In addition, it can give information about depth as well as the shape of object buried underground.
　We use vector rader equipped with three antenna elements as GPR. This rader is designed to adaptively scan a ground surface to minimize the ground reflection effect. We also suggest a signal processing technique.

Fuzzy Sensor Fusion for Anti Personal Land Mine Detection

　
　In this research, one of the soft computing techniques, fuzzy, is applied for automatic detection of an anti-personnel landmine. A "feature in-decision out" fuzzy sensor fusion algorithm for a ground penetrating radar, (GPR), and a metal detector, (MD), for mine detection is applied. The inputs to the fuzzy fusion system are features extracted from both GPR and MD measurements, (shown in Figure). The output from the fuzzy fusion system is a decision if there is a landmine and at what depth it would be. Fuzzy fusion rules are extracted from training data through a fuzzy learning algorithm. The proposed fuzzy fusion algorithm would minimize the false alarm rate for mine detection.

Landmine Surveying System with Low-ground-pressure Vehicle

　
　This research is intended to construct landmine detection system with low-ground-pressure vehicle. Low-ground-pressure vehicle is a mine detection vehicle which can enter a minefield and detect landmines without allowing landmines to be detonated, even if it passes on buried landmines positions. It enables to enlarge ground contact area by adjusting its soft-tires internal pressure. Also, we suggest the control method considering the deformation of flexible tires.

Research Projects 2005

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