Towards Security-aimed Humanitarian Demining in Unstable Conditions: A Minimalistic 3D Hopping Robot with Parallel 3-RSR Leg

Abstract

To keep the top priority of deminers’ safety, manipulating unstable mines needs assistance from robots to reduce human casualties. Although emerging quadrupedal robots with arms have the capability of disposing of mines, they are at high costs with sophisticated designs and are not suitable for unstable mines with a high probability of causing explosions. In this paper, we propose a minimalistic 3D dynamic hopping robot with a parallel 3-RSR leg, serving as a security-aimed portable demining robot. With the omnidirectional movement and force-adjusting capability, it can stably hop to a target location and trigger a mine with planned contact forces, playing a complementary role when the mines are in unstable conditions where picking them up is not allowable. The minimalistic robot has a lightweight leg that provides a large stroke and tilting angle for high mobility and contact force in a controlled manner. Besides, it is low-cost (up to $3.5k) and only around 1.75% of a commercial quadrupedal robot (e.g., fully-equipped Spot, around $200k). Finally, we conducted several experiments in a laboratory setting, including stable 3D hopping, contact force measurement, and simulated demining tests. The initial results demonstrate the feasibility of our minimalistic demining robot towards security-aimed humanitarian demining.

Publications

[1] C. Y. Fan, X. Chu, S. Fan, and K. W. Samuel Au, “Towards Security-aimed Humanitarian Demining in Unstable Conditions: A Minimalistic 3D Hopping Robot with Parallel 3-RSR Leg,” IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024, (under review).