Slashdot Mirror
Minesweepers Robotic Competition Aims For a Landmine-Free World
Hallie Siegel (2973169) writes in with news of a robotic competition with some serious goals. "Dr. Alaa Khamis writes: 'Detection and removal of antipersonnel landmines is, at present, a serious problem of political, economical, environmental and humanitarian dimensions in many countries across the world. It is estimated that there are 110 million landmines in the ground right now; one for every 52 inhabitants on the planet. These mines kill or maim more than 5,000 people annually. If demining efforts remain about the same as they are now, and no new mines are laid, it will still take 1100 years to get rid of all the world's active land mines because current conventional methods of removal are very slow, inefficient, dangerous and costly. Robotic systems can provide efficient, reliable, adaptive and cost effective solutions for the problem of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) contamination. Minesweepers: Towards a Landmine-free World was initiated in 2012 as the first international outdoor robotic competition on humanitarian demining by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society – Egypt Chapter, which won the Chapter of the Year Award in IEEE Region 8 that year. It aims to raise public awareness of the seriousness of landmines and UXO contamination and the role of science and technology in addressing these; it also aims to foster robotics research in the area of humanitarian demining by motivating professors, engineers and students to work on innovative solutions for this serious problem."
On sale now!
It is estimated that there are 110 million landmines in the ground right now; one for every 52 inhabitants on the planet.
52 (people/mine) * 110 million (mines) = 5.72 billion people. Unless there's been a recent disaster that killed off more than a billion people that I didn't hear about, I think their math's a little off.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
so do they plan to mail out kits with land mines for us to test with ?
Nullius in verba
That's not a lot. According to wolframalpha, 58 million people die every year. Given this percentage, is minesweeping even cost-effective, or is it more of a charity pump/drain?
Isn't it more newsworthy that there are only 52 inhabitants on the planet?
Just type xyzzy and then hit shift and enter at the same time. Every time you point at a mine the top left corner of your vision will turn black.
[disclaimer: may only work on computer screens and not in the real world. AC LLC cannot be held responsible for your dismemberment]
At first I thought someone was going to write a PC virus to uninstall all minesweeper games from every version of windows on the planet. Thank god!
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
Problem is that there isn't any cheap way to demine. Yes, there are clever methods like teaching rats to sniff out mines, but usually the areas where there are mine or UXO problems tend to be the places which can least afford to do this.
Anything in this front is a good thing.
And thus the problem. When you are in a war, winning matters more than the ethics of what some obsolete mine would do. The fact is, if they were easy to get rid of, they would lose their military value.
perhaps, if there is an easy solution for the enemy to avoid your landmines, then maybe it would not be worth the trouble to place them. but that's about the only way you're going to get the mines to stop.
.. and here I thought this about some AI contest used to test which algorithms best "solve" minesweeper. :-/
Given 5000 deaths per year and 110 million mines, we'd be better off ignoring them. Most of the mines would decay into uselessness long before they killed someone (at the current death rate, in a century, 99% of the mines will not have been stepped on, and that's ignoring the fact that the mines won't last a century.).
Except that developing the tech to clear existing mine fields efficiently may help when some idiot in the future lays a bunch of new mines. Ideally developing the tech would make traditional mines so ineffective no one would bother using them, but such a notion may be a bit optimistic. However expecting treaties banning mines to end the use of mines may be even more optimistic.
Develop the tech, it will probably have numerous other uses too.
Use Goats.See, goats wander around eating things. Goatset off mines. This actually happens on an uninhabited Hawaiian island (unintentionally).
A remote version of one of the Hobart's Funnies from WW2, either the Bullshorn Plough or the Crab pattern or some weird combination of the two.
With modern robotics and materials that could be a damn site more durable and efficient too,
"In one of the many wars on your miserable little planet, they used to drive robots across minefields.. principle is the same!"
I would add to the Master's astute observation that this would be an excellent job for a roomba!
... just maybe, we should stop *making* them.
Every time someone works harder to keep mines from killing children, the Republicans make even more dangerous mines. Just look at what they did to Vietnam. More children die there from mines than from any other Republican-related cause. The Republicans will just spend billions more of our money to make even larger and harder to detect mines. They'll use this as an excuse to murder even more children. That is their way. It's easier and safer to just let them have their fun than it is to fight them and piss them off. Children are going to die because of this.
Good. Then I can play Luminesweeper on my Game Boy Advance.
Perhaps the one that laid mines could financially help the effort?
namely walk a platoon of troops through the minefield? sure could use that in Ukraine right now...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
A sensible approach is to manufacture land mines that decay naturally, so that they become inoperable after a few months or so. That means the people who want to use them can, and yet once they become more of a liability, they will become inert.
203 years from now when there are no more fossil fuels and the sky is scorched black from pollution, these landmines will be the sole source of energy for the remaining humans --- err Morlocks --- an each one will be treasured for the precious contents.
It is our gift to future generations to package these valuable energy resources into tidy metal containers that we so thoughtfully buried for the benefit of future generations.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Maybe if international treaties are changed to put a limit on the implemented mine's life, the problem can be addressed partially. Mines are effective weapons and therefore they will always be in production. If they are made of material that dissolves in the ground after, let's say 20 years, the problem can go away faster with time while maintaining the effectiveness of the weapon in wars.
Not exactly a win-win... but better than nothing.
There is a multi billion weapon industry that keeps producing landmines, and that industry has huge tax breaks. And we are using tax money for reasearch to clean up the very mess they are causing. Something is very wrong here.
Drones surveying with IR, metal detector and possibly ground penetrating radar could sweep an area defined by GPS and produce a map of suspect spots.
Such a setup would be so useful for general surveying/archaeology/treasure hunting it must already exist? A quick search shows a few results for agricultural surveys.
I don't know if when they are 'deployed' whether there are regular patterns that could be used for machine recognition? Use a pen of goats or heavily armoured versions of Big Dog to detonate. Or design something like the StrandBeest to wander around and stomp on every square inch.
You could also crowd source the clearance of a particular area, cheap heavy ground pounding robots with video feeds driven around by 'the internet' - potential of setting off a real life mine would supply drivers 24hrs a day.
"110 million landmines in the ground right now; one for every 52 inhabitants on the planet" So, there is 2.11 million people in the world? I think not!
Why not just cluster bomb the area, setting the mines off? Mine problem gone!