Industry Category
Companies are invited to participate in this category of Minesweepers competition and demonstrate their state-of-the-art solutions and technologies in the area of humanitarian demining. In this category, each participating team will have to build a teleoperated or autonomous robot, UGV, or UAV. This robot must be remotely controlled to perform the following actions:
- Search for surface-laid and buried metallic and minimum metal objects of different dimensions and shapes using teleoperated or an autonomous ground/aerial vehicle. These objects mimic the anti-personnel landmines and unexploded ordnances. The vehicle has to able to navigate through rough environment that mimics a real minefield.
- Automatically produce a high-precision map for the locations of the detected objects without human intervention.
- Identifying the types of the detected landmines.
- Collecting and moving the detected surface landmines to a built-in container or to a designated area outside the competition arena using a teleoperated or autonomous grasping mechanism.
Minefield
The competition arena will be an area one of grass or desert land with a size of 20mx20m, will be marked only by plastic tape for visualization purposes to stop the robots from going outside the competition area, there will not be any flags or lines in the arena . The arena will be have Buried Mines: These mines are made from metallic and non-metallic shapes, with different dimensions up to approximate dimensions of 10x10x10 cm3 (LxWxD). These mines are completely buried underground with maximum depth 10 cm. Surface Mines; will be black metallic and non-metallic shapes are used to simulate above ground mines and unexploded ordnance (UXOsThe location of the surface mines will be changed every match) with different dimensions.
For more details and score sheet check the Rule Book.
Academia Category
Academia category, for undergraduates and postgraduates, in this category, each participating team will have to build a teleoperated or autonomous robot, UGV, or UAV. This robot must be remotely controlled to perform the following actions:
- Search for surface-laid and buried metallic objects of a cubical shapes using teleoperated or an autonomous ground/aerial vehicle. These objects mimic the anti-personnel landmines and unexploded ordnances. The vehicle has to able to navigate through rough environment that mimics a real minefield.
- Automatically produce a high-precision map for the locations of the detected objects without human intervention.
- Collecting and moving the detected surface landmines to a built-in container or to a designated area outside the competition arena using a teleoperated or autonomous grasping mechanism.
Minefield
The competition environment will be an area one of grass or desert land with a size of 20mx20m, will be marked only by plastic tape for visualization purposes to stop the robots from going outside the competition area, there will not be any flags or lines in the arena. The arena will have Buried Mines: These mines are made from metallic cubes, with approximate dimensions of 10x10x10 cm3 (LxWxD). These mines are completely buried underground with maximum depth 10 cm. Surface Mines; will be black metallic cubes are used to simulate above ground mines and unexploded ordnance (UXOsThe location of the surface mines will be changed every match) with approximate dimensions of 5*5*5 cm3 (L*W*D).
For more details and score sheet check the Rule Book.
青少年类别
Junior category, for preparatory and high schools students, in this category, each participating team will have to build a teleoperated or autonomous robot, UGV, or UAV. This robot must be remotely controlled to perform the following actions:
- Search for surface-laid and buried metallic objects of a cubical shapes using teleoperated or an autonomous ground/aerial vehicle. These objects mimic the anti-personnel landmines and unexploded ordnances. The vehicle has to able to navigate through rough environment that mimics a real minefield.
- Collecting and moving the detected surface landmines to a built-in container or to a designated area outside the competition arena using a teleoperated or autonomous grasping mechanism.
雷场
The competition environment will be an area one of grass or desert land with a size of 20mx20m, will be marked only by plastic tape for visualization purposes to stop the robots from going outside the competition area, there will not be any flags or lines in the arena. The arena will have 埋地雷: ：这些地雷由金属立方体制成，尺寸约为10x10x10 cm3（长x宽x高）。这些地雷 完全埋在地下，最大深度为10厘米。 Surface Mines; will be black metallic cubes are used to simulate above ground mines and unexploded ordnance (UXOsThe location of the surface mines will be changed every match) with approximate dimensions of 5*5*5 cm3 (L*W*D).
有关详细信息和评分表，请查看规则手册
ROS
To participate in the competition with ROS you must build the software of your robot system using Robot Operating System (ROS).
The competition mission with using ROS is the same as the mission in all classes shown previous with the score multiplied by 1.2 in the normal system
ROS is an open source platform that provides a set of software libraries and tools to help you build robot applications. It provides hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management, and more. Building the robot based on ROS allows you to make use of interesting software module and the high fidelity simulator developed by the participants of the different editions of Humanitarian Robotics and Automation Technology Challenge (HRATC) organized by IEEE Robotics & Automation Society – Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology (RAS–SIGHT). Minesweepers is also organised under the auspices of IEEE RAS SIGHT
- What is ROS?
Hardware: You can build your own robot and make it ROS-enabled or you can use low-cost ROS-enabled robotic starter kits.
Software: You can write your own ROS code or you can download and use ROS Open Source Modules for Humanitarian Demining: SIGHT – Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology Open Repositories
ROS Tutorials:
ROS (Robot Operating System) is a flexible framework for writing robot software provides libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications. It provides hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management, and more. ROS is completely open source (BSD) and free for others to use, change and commercialize. It aims to simplify the task of creating complex and robust robot behavior across a wide variety of robotic platforms and enable software developers to build more capable robot applications quickly and easily on a common platform.
Multi-Robot Systems (MRS)
Multi-robot systems (MRS) are a group of robots that are designed aiming to perform some collective behavior. By this collective behavior, some goals that are impossible for a single robot to achieve become feasible and attainable. There are various foreseen benefits of MRS compared to single robot systems. These benefits include, but are not limited to the following [Khamis 2014]:
- Resolving task complexity.
- Increasing the performance.
- Increasing reliability.
- Simplicity in design.
MRS can play a crucial role in humanitarian demining. According to the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for humanitarian demining, human deminers use metal detectors to identify targets, which are then flagged for subsequent digging by a supervisor. The objective of this category is to mimic the conventional mag-and-flag approach or SOP using multiple unmanned teleoperated and autonomous vehicles. The arena of the competition is shown in the following figure. Teleoperated vehicles play the role of human deminers while an autonomous vehicle is used to mimic the supervisor/team leader’s role. The team leader has to be equipped with a gripper or a marking mechanism to mark the location of the landmine detected by the deminers. More than one deminer can be integrated into the team but only one supervisor or team leader is allowed. If two deminers are used, these unmanned vehicles “A” and “B” are assigned to each lane as shown in the figure. Vehicle “B” starts to work after vehicle “A”. If a deminer detected a surface-laid or a buried mine in its assigned lane, it has to produce a warning siren for at least 2 seconds and inform the team leader about the position of the detected mine. All the deminers have to stop and wait while the autonomous vehicle (the team leader) comes forward marks the detected mine with a red mark or flag and the scanning procedure continues until the entire arena is scanned.
If the team participate with using multi-robots system, the competition mission will be as mentioned before and not depending on the class it belongs to
*1.2 will multiply the whole score
UAVs/ Drones
UAVs/ Drones are allowed to be used in the competition to do the same tasks like the teleoperated or autonomous robots in all categories but if the team uses UAV, it will have 20% bonus score additional to the main missions score.
