[Discourse.ros.org] [ROS Projects] Humanitarian Demining with ROS?

[al-dev]

al-dev June 5

Hi everyone, I was wondering if members of the ROS community were aware of any past/ongoing open-source robotics projects around humanitarian demining? i.e projects with the goal of designing and building a software/hardware architecture for robots (Rovers,UAVs) to perform autonomous or semi-autonomous landmine detection and/or removal. It seems like the kind of application that could make great use of the ROS framework and maybe also some open-hardware design, so I am surprised to see relatively few references in Google : * Minesweepers competition, 27-30 oct 2016, Egypt : http://www.landminefree.org/home/ * Humanitarian Robotics and Automation Technology Challenge (HRATC) and the IEEE RAS-SIGHT(Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology) : http://www.ieee-ras.org/educational-resources-outreach/humanitarian-efforts * Clearpath Robotics apparently supports these competitions : http://www.clearpathrobotics.com/2014/01/robot-used-for-humanitarian-research/ And for the above competitions, I cannot find any organized code repository calling for remote contributors. I was wondering what were the main obstacles to creating such a project : * Cost of hardware too high for individual contributors to build their platform? * Difficulty to reproduce a proper testing environment ? * General lack of interest for humanitarian robotics? As a ROS user with experience in navigation, this is the kind of project that I would be glad to dedicate some spare time to, so I just wanted to start by collecting some general feedback. What are your thoughts? Thanks!

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[Barrett Ames]

Barrett_Ames June 6

When ROS was first released, I was developing software for Cornell Minesweeper, which was a set of robots devoted to just this problem. Surprisingly, almost 5 years after we shut the team down, the website is still up: http://minesweeper.engineering.cornell.edu/ We used an early form of the ROS navigation stack, a GPS, an old SICK lidar. We tested out at Ft. Belvior in VA. Our biggest problem, failure on test day. Everything ran great the night before the demo. Then we got out in front of the military, and the robot refused to move. Cornell cut funding after that kind of failure, and we just all went our separate ways. I definitely think it's a good problem to go after, and I'd be more than happy to share my experience in designing and developing the different Minesweeper robots. As far as why you don't see any calls for remote developing, there were certainly a great number of hardware specific issues, developing drivers/firmware/interfaces etc. Hardware was expensive, ~20k, and that was for just a metal detector, some of the fancier landmine detection methods cost 100k+. Some of this could be alleviated by allowing network access to sensors, or possibly by bagging lots of data if you need signal processing type work. Testing environment is dependent on the particular sensor type, in our case, we just buried nails in dirt. Lastly, I'd say there is a desire to help with humanitarian causes, at our largest we were a team of just under 30 undergrads. Not the biggest team at Cornell, but a good medium sized team. Smart and enterprising people, some of whom went on to found Kiva Systems.