The next big thing in demining is robots.
At least that’s the dream of the Minesweepers: Towards a Landmine Free World conference announced earlier this month. The 7th annual robotics competition will take place in Madrid, Spain in October 2018, in conjunction with the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots.
According to the rules, “each participating team will construct a teleoperated or an autonomous unmanned ground or aerial robot that should be able to search for surface-laid and buried landmines and produce automatically a map of the detected objects. The robot has to able to navigate through rough environment that mimics a real minefield”
Competitors will be divided into three categories: juniors, academics, and industry specialists. Each team will present and explain their technology, before conducting a mock field test to map a minefield.
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