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Humanitarian Robotics |
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Thrishantha Nanayakkara, PhD School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Harvard University Room 238, Maxwell Dworkin 33 Oxford Street Cambridge, MA 02138 USA Tel: 617-460-2256 Email: thrish@seas.harvard.edu |
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I am interested in building robots that can learn by interacting with humans and animals to accomplish complex goals in a humanitarian mission. At present I am mainly working on humanitarian landmine detection in tropical environments. By combining approaches from robotics, machine learning, ethology, and man-machine interaction, we envisage to serve a broad class of objectives in a humanitarian demining mission that includes detecting all landmines in a given area, causing no damage to the vegetation and the sensitive fertile soil layer, managing ground contact forces within safe limits to make sure no mines are detonated on-site, and posing no threat to the human operators. The robots that are specially designed to suit vegetated environments serve as a link between the remote human operators and trained rodents who find odor gradients leading to mines. In this regard, we ask fundamental questions to do with robotic physical morphology and locomotion on soft terrains and forest environments under task constraints, animal odor guided behavior, robotic behavior adaptation by interacting with rodents and humans, and characterization of the environment by animal-robot mixed swarms etc. I believe that such adaptive animal-robot-human integrated systems will be able to evolve complex behavioral phenomena and serve future humanitarian missions with complex goals. |
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New to demining research? This bit of advise may be useful to you. |
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