Adaptive fuzzy force control of an anti-personnel (AP) mine detector robot

At present, there are approximately 110 million land mines scattered around the world in 64 countries. The clearing of these mines takes place manually. Unfortunately, on average, for every 5000 mines to be cleared, one mine clearer is killed. A mine detector robot (MDR) is under development at the Electronic Research Center. The robot arm imitates a manual hand-prodding technique for mine detection. It inserts a sharp metal bar (probe) into the soil whose parameters, such as stiffness are unknown and vary depending on the type of soil. An explicit force control scheme is applied as the main control scheme, while an adaptive fuzzy controller is designed to deal with uncertainties and varying environment parameters. Simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the proposed control scheme.