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SIL06 Robot Land Mine Detector
The SIL06 land mine detection robot is a six-legged, ground-crawling bot that tries to make life a bit safer for those who search for and defuse landmines.
(SIL06 land mine detection robot)
It uses an alternating tripod gait, which always places three of its robotic feet on the ground.
Walking robots are intrinsically slow machines, and machine speed is well known to depend theoretically on the number of legs the machine has. Therefore, a hexapod can achieve higher speed than a quadruped, and a hexapod achieves its highest speed when using a wave gait with a duty factor of β = 1/2, that is, using alternating tripods.
The SIL06 has special sensor heads for detecting landmines and other objects. When it detects a mine, it sends GPS data to a remote location for later disposition.
There are different sensor technologies for detecting mines. The simplest consist in metal detectors. These sensors are simple, lightweight and easy to use. However, they only detect mines that have metal parts, and they are inefficient with non-metallic mines (plastic mines). Other sensor types are required in such cases, such as sensors based on ground-penetrating radar (GPR), chemical sensors or artificial noses.
This low-slung robot reminded me a lot of the forensics sniffer robot from the 1985 movie Runaway, particularly if the SIL06 were to have a chemical-sensing head.
(Sniffer robot from Runaway)
Learn lots more at the very detailed SILO-6 and DYLEMA Projects' Home Page via Plasticpals.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 9/22/2009)
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