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Robot Mine Smasher
A reader writes "
Robotsotre had a link to a Japanese story about a new landmine-hunting robot that covers the mine with a protective dome and then smashes it with a high-velocity hydraulic piston. The company's called Cos Co, the robot is 3.5m long, and the cost about $75K (USD).
Robot mine hunter does job quietly
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20020213wo71.htm
Not that I know much about landmines, but does this mean the detonator cap is smashed without detonating? Or separated from the explosives before it can?" As this article also points out, this will help remove mines in Afghanistan, which after 20 years of war has more then a few around.
Why detonate the mine when you can put it on fire without any explosion.
Most explosives can burn without exploding.
A simple burning bullet might do the trick.
The problem is often not disarming the mine but finding it.
/Tobias
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
They say "The hammer can strike mines at velocities of up to three meters per second.".
So, that's 3m*60s*60m = 10800m/h = 10.8 km/h.
That's fast? I smell some misinformation in here.
One of the things that I miss is how such a robot would move around. Mines usually aren't all hidden in easy accesible places on a road, so how does this droid come to the mines? Let's hope that the test version did not count on human beings carrying it. I can already imagine 10 people lifting this piece of iron, lugging it towards the mines when suddenly one of them hears a click under his foot.
"Sorry Jim, but we're going to defuse the bomb through your foot. This will only hurt a bit."
I intend to live forever, so far so good.
Some of the minefields there were hit by massive
floods recently. Now the mines are shifted,
so mine maps are no good, and they're oriented
every which way. Build a robot that can
handle that, and you will prove yourself a
major stud.
So whats new? America have been practising one thing and preaching another for years. Weapons and War seem to be an almost staple diet. The whole country is screwed up. Hey, its okay for young kids to own handguns, but hell, we don't want security cameras filming the public, that would just be an invasion of privacy.
Yeah, I'm, trolling. Yeah, I'll be modded down. But I still think America is fucked up.
I was in the Army for a while and even spent some time working with the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit learning about bomb defusal. I think this robot is a great idea and could even work, but it has some definate drawbacks. There are a lot of mines where this would work very well.
The Army uses small explosive charges themselves to disarm the mines while at the same time the explosion throws them out of the way. As far as everyone talking about the non-ideal terrain that it would have to find mines on, I don't entirely agree. Military disposal is usually limited to making a wide enough path through an area so the rest of the force can travel through. The military doesn't waste time (according to them a waste of time) disarming every mine they come across. They just take care of the ones directly in their way and move on. As long as the mines in the area were not of a very few specific types of the mines out there, it would be great to not have to risk human lives and use the robot to disarm the mines.
A few issues that would need to be addressed are the sensing, disposal after the crushing, and different triggers. The robot would need a density sensor on it to accurately find mines that contain a small amount(sometimes none)of metal. These make up only a small amount of the land mines that industrialized countries drop, but there are tons of homemade landmines out there in the world.
Disposal after the crushing with the piston is another issue. Just because the main detonator is destroyed doesn't make the landmine safe. There are plenty of landmine configurations that have secondary detonators that are much harder to destroy.
As for the different kinds of triggers, yes this would probably not work with magnetic triggers. There are plenty of different types of magnetic triggers, and I'm sure it would work for some of them. This almost doesn't matter because of the low frequency at which you will find those few kinds of triggers I can think of where it wouldn't work, but it will happen from time to time. It depends on how big of an area the magnetic field covers. Most of them just cover a small area right above the mine, but I have heard of a few whose only option for removal is to have the EOD guys strip naked(don't want your zipper or any other stupid thing setting it off) and do it by hand.
So could this be a great idea? Yes. Does it have limitations? Yes. Do I think 75K is worth spending and not risking a human life? Absolutely.
This report for the US army reckons that the best compromise is to fit an independent 2nd fuse on every item of ordnance, based purely on the cost measured pragmatically in terms of US military casualties from friendly UXO, let alone civilian casualties.
I don't know about the follow up, but I expect that it failed the up-front-cost laugh test based on the simple observation that your ordnance is usually dropped on the other guy in a dusty country, so who gives a damn. Not us, obviously. :(
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The problem with mines is that they hard very hard to detect. Modern mines have very little if any metal content. Battlefields usually are riddled with shrapnel/shell casings etc which make metal detecters useless even if the mine had metal.
The Canadian Defence Research Establishment(DRES) in Sulfield Alberta is a world leader in mine detection technologies. Their latest invention is the Improved Landmine DetectorProject (ILDP). The ILDP system consists of a teleoperated vehicle carrying three scanning sensors which operate while the system is in motion; a metal detector array (MMD) based on electromagnetic induction (EMI), an infrared imager (IR), ground penetrating radar (GPR), and a confirmatory sensor which requires the system to be stationary and near a target of interest, consisting of a thermal neutron analysis (TNA) detector. Each of the sensors provides information concerning the presence (or absence) of physical properties which accompany the presence of landmines. For example, IR provides a measure of thermal anomalies, EMI reports anomalies in electrical conductivity, GPR detects anomalies in dielectric and other electromagnetic properties, and the TNA provides a measure of nitrogen content.
One the mine is identified and marked the vehicle can move on and let the lifing or destruction of the mine to the engineers.
Canada first proposed the banning of anti-personnel mines and the treaty is commonly refered to as the Ottawa treaty. They also set up the Canadian Centre for Mine Action Technologies which is coordinating research into new technologies from around the world.
As a soldier, I agree that anti pers mines have a limited tactical role and the human cost in civilian casualties is too great to justify their use. It is time to ban them forever.
Cheers,
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.