Despite the call for peace, conflicts remain a sad reality across the globe. When you look at the big picture, war has no winning side as lives are lost and people are injured. Even when the fighting ends, casualties are still reported. Sadly, these are not caused by firearms but by land mines. In a bid to prevent these deaths, we have a concept called the Warden.
Military research estimates the number of land mines planted around the world number in the millions. The ultimate goal is to pinpoint the exact locations of these explosive weapons, disable them, and retrieve them for proper disposal. JiHoon Park and Subin Kim came up with a robotic platform that can function autonomously.
Typically, what activates land mines is the pressure generated when somebody steps on one. However, other variants can be triggered by proximity, vibrations, sound, and others. Therefore, the Warden is designed to operate autonomously with an option for manual control to allow soldiers to scout ahead when in a war zone.
An illustration supplied by the designers indicates it measures 390 mm high and 726 mm long. Inside the almost egg-like housing are electric motors that drive its four wheels, another motor for the lawn blade attachment, an MRI mine detector, an ink tank, forward-facing lights, a transparent canopy with a camera, a GPS transmitter, a main battery, and a backup battery.
Instead of rubber tires, the wheels are shod in what looks like tank treads for maximum traction. The bottom-mounted blades can clear grass and other foliage while a nozzle sprays ink to mark the spot where a land mine was detected by its sensors. The Warden maintains an active connection with a cloud server as it uploads GPS data to accurately pinpoint the tagged spot.
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Images courtesy of JiHoon Park/Subin Kim/Behance
