Wed. March 5 2008: Thrishantha Nanayakkara on Animal-Robot Mixed Colonies for Humanitarian Land-mine Detection
The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its weekly lunch seminar:
CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 5 March 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 319
Topic: Animal-Robot Mixed Colonies for Humanitarian Land-mine Detection
Speaker: Thrishantha Nanayakkara, PhD
Abstract:
One of the main objectives of humanitarian demining is to detect and remove landmines with minimum damage to the environment, whereas in military demining on-site detonation of land-mines is acceptable. Unfortunately, a lack of appropriate technologies for humanitarian de-mining slows down many post-conflict human re-settlement programs in many developing countries. Since de-mining is a pre-requisite to post-conflict economic revival, there are vast opportunities for novel technologies that could make a direct impact on the speed and safety of de-mining. The talk elaborates a project in progress in Sri Lanka, which has also been proposed to be extended in a Harvard Initiative to develop appropriate technologies for humanitarian de-mining. The current focus is on a heterogeneous system of trained rodents, field robots, and human experts to detect landmines in an unstructured forest environment. A salient feature of the proposed system is that each sub-system (robots, animals, and humans) improve their individual capabilities by interacting with each other. It will also discuss current work on distributed sensing techniques for on-the-go estimation of a parametric model of the distribution of land-mines in a given minefield to improve the efficiency of area coverage.