K.T.M. Udayanga Hemapala (M’08) received his B.Sc. (Eng.) degree from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, in 2004 and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Genova, Italy. He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. His research interests are in industrial robotics, distributed generation, power system control, and smart grid.
More than 100,000,000 anti-personnel mines have been laid in deferent part of the world by terrorists or government forces. The mines are cheapest weapon, built to make horrible injuries, affecting active people, with major falls-off into economic growth. Therefore, after or during a war demining is a big technological problem which needs to address by the governments. All demining activities can be classified mainly in two different ways, military demining and humanitarian demining. Main objective of military demining is to make a quick safe path for troops and may be 80% clearing is enough for them. On the other hand, humanitarian demining target is to clear 100% to ensure the use of lands by people who are not involved in the conflicts for their day-to-day activities including farming. Mainly humanitarian demining has two tasks: detection and removal. Still the use of robots is questionable in this regard. Mainly robots work well for clean and reliable tasks. When the price to performance ratio is too high, they are academic toys. This chapter presents the overview of the available robotic technologies with a depth comparison between them by considering the appropriateness to the local context.
Part of the book: Robots Operating in Hazardous Environments