Air drones for explosive landmines detection

Abstract

Explosive landmines have cost the lives of hundreds in several countries. This paper presents a field report of a low cost unmanned aerial vehicle -ARdrone 2.0- used as a complemented tool for landmine visual detection in rural scenarios. The main contribution of this work is the practical experimentation with an integrated tool. This tool is composed by the ARdrone quadrotor and a base station for monitoring the mission. Based on visual feedback from the onboard camera, algorithms for landmine detection are applied. Experiments have been carried out to quantify the performance of the platform by means of measuring the percentage of the detection at different set of flight speeds and altitudes. The goal is not only to detect fully visible landmines but also those partially buried. It has been observed an effective percentage of the detection over 80% when flying at low altitudes about 1m from the ground at speeds up to 2.2ms−1. The visual methods introduced herein might enable the ARdrone quadrotor to be used as a low-cost autonomous platform for safe area coverage applied to landmine detection in real scenarios.