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."
so do they plan to mail out kits with land mines for us to test with ?
Nullius in verba
Oh I see what's happened here, instead of a flu shot they gave you a context vaccine.
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)
You want to bring up cost effective? Well fuck you, economics should have ZERO argument in this issue. Clean the fucking things up.
It's called Doing the Right goddamn thing.
There is limited available funds to save peoples lives with, even if everyone on the planet devoted all their effort to helping solve problems, there is still a finite amount of resources available. With that in mind, there are far more dangerous things in the world that kill far more people in a year, solving those problems should come first.
Prioritizing doesn't mean you do nothing, it means you work on the more important problems first.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The only way you can clear a minefield and guarantee that the field is safe is to know exactly how many mines are in the area, and search till you find them all. Which means accepting the cost in both money and lives to keep going till you've ticked off each mine.
Note that knowing the exact number of mines in an area is pretty much impossible for anything other than a test field for this technology.
Not going to happen. If I'm at war and defending a position, a minefield makes a lot of sense. And the machineguns, rocket launchers, artillery, etc I have in or covering the position can be used to blow up your minesweeper robots. It'll even help a bit, by giving my guys something to do to keep alert (blowing up robots is always fun).
And once the war is over, well, good luck determining exactly how many mines are in the area still, since some will have been detonated during the war, and lord knows the grunts in the area don't have time to remember mine detonations....
Seriously, the tech is interesting, and should be developed. But it won't magically render mines useless, nor will it render areas known to contain mines safe. Unless it's 100% effective at finding mines. And you'll only know that by letting people use the (former) minefield and seeing how many of them get blown into next week....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Use Goats.See, goats wander around eating things. Goatset off mines. This actually happens on an uninhabited Hawaiian island (unintentionally).
You are not considering the fact that the mines render huge areas essentially unusable due to the risk of getting killed or maimed. This is an enormous continuing cost burden on the affected nations This area denial effect is the reason the mines were put there in the first place!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
This shows the number of casualties as as per country as a circular area.
This shows maps the casualties to the relative size of the country. This makes it hard to figure out exactly which country is hurting the most, but it dramatically shows how bad some places have it compared to the rest of the world. Anyone who is not shocked by seeing this is a psychopathic personality type.
Why is Snark Required?
It's not the deaths.
It's not even the limbs lost.
It's the fact that some unknown area of land is completely unusable and unsafe. And I mean COMPLETELY.
Maybe you can look at it from a distance.
If you're looking for a "cost-effective" reason and saving couple of thousand lives per year is just not enough of a reason for you.
Here in Bosnia we have lots of mines and unexploded ordnance laying around thanks to that lovely party we had back in the '90s.
We also have plenty of forest fires each summer.
Now, besides the fact that we are severely lacking in the firefighting department (BOTH of our military helicopters used for firefighting tend to use up all the FUEL that the army has in first two days; trucks only go where there are roads, and many trucks are vintage '60s models repaired with such ingenious inventions as welding a crowbar onto a gearshift cause the original got torn off long ago) - places where fires tend to burn also tend to be littered with mines.
Or not. Nobody knows for sure.
Imagine trying to put out a forest fire with a backpack of water and a broom.
Now imagine that forest also firing off a bullet or two, from time to time, in a random direction.
Or a mortar shell exploding. Or the ground being covered in mines.
You know? Fun!
So what happens? Forests burn.
Until they burn close enough to be put out, or help comes from the neighbors in surrounding countries, or it rains.
Thing is, if they are burning close enough - that's cause they are close enough to where people live.
That's fires...
Guess what happens when rains start? You got it!
Landslides. Now you (maybe) have mines and UXOs where there were none just a weekend ago.
Who the fuck knows, right?
It's been 20+ years since the start of the war.
The best part?
Finding out that MAYBE there were mines couple of hundred meters from where you used to go to work, and right in the yard of a place where you're supposed to go to work.
A decade after the war ended. In the middle of a populated, urban, area. Right next to a main road.
Maybe there are mines there. Nobody knows anymore.
Then again, not so long ago several hundred rounds of ammunition and couple of grenades were found inside a locked room in the main building of the Presidency.
Nobody opened that door for a decade. Nobody NEEDED to open it for a decade.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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
Except land mine areas are concentrated, and do not always cause death. Take a trip to Cambodia, and walk down the street in Phnomh Penh. Every few block you'll see people missing limbs because they stepped on a landmine. If you have even a bit of a human heart, you'll understand that landmines as a method to engage in war are horrific. (Although you could argue ALL of war is horrific, land mines particularly so). They persist many years after the conflict is over, mainly injure the indigenous population (instead of targeting the enemy), and because nobody wants to step on a land mine, if you live in a land mine area you simply declare areas where land mines exist as off limits, rendering large areas completely unusable.