Subaru tests mine-clearing robot

Fuji Heavy Industries plans to use a robot to help clear mines in Croatia. The company, best known as the maker of Subaru cars, will begin testing the robot in Croatia at the end of January 2006, the Daily Yomiuri reported this week. 

The semi-autonomous 1.5 ton robot uses a metal detector and soil-penetrating radar to detect the presence and shape of metal objects below ground.

Fuji Heavy claims that it can identify mines up to one metre below the surface with better than 90 per cent accuracy. The firm is seeking approval from the Croatian government and international organisations to deploy the robot more widely.

Tens of thousands of mines were spread indiscriminately in Croatia and neighbouring nations during the conflict surrounding the break up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

"The presence of landmines still cripples Croatia's recovery. Thirteen of 21 counties, measuring 1,700 square kilometres, are affected by landmines. The threat restricts mobility and impedes development," said the internationally-funded Adopt-A-Minefield programme in a report last year. 

Landmines.org said that it costs $30,000 to clear a typical 15,000 square metre minefield in Croatia using today's technology. 

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"The current method of removing mines manually is costly and dangerous," said Professor Kenzo Nonami of Tokyo's Chiba University. "Moreover, removal of all mines by this method would require several hundred years." 

Professor Nonami leads a robot development team that has worked with Fuji Heavy on several prototype mine clearing robots, including the model being tested in Croatia.

Fuji Heavy, which focuses mainly on vehicle and aerospace manufacturing, has devoted considerable research and development resources into robotics in the past decade.

The company has demonstrated autonomous robots suitable for various tasks, including garbage collection and floor cleaning.

Working in collaboration with Professor Nonami's team, Fuji Heavy has developed a wide variety of mine clearing robots, some of which the company hopes will see service in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the near future.

They include a one ton six-legged spider, powered by a gasoline engine, that crawls over the minefield probing the ground and marking suspected mines.

Although remote controlled robots have been used to assist with some mine clearing tasks in recent years, autonomous mine-clearing robots have not yet gone beyond the experimental stage.

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