Unmanned Earth Mover For Hazardous Operations 2009-28-0061
Personnel from Border Road Organisation, Military Engineers and the Public Works Department are actively engaged in earth removing operation in landslide prone areas and snow clearance tasks in mountainous areas in the North and Northeast of India. These tasks are to be carried out every year seasonally depending on the weather and terrain conditions. These operations are inherently hazardous and risky causing loss of human life.
An innovative attempt has been made to modify an earth mover for unmanned operations to facilitate tele-operation from a safe distance. An existing earth mover has been converted to a drive-by-wire mode by providing different electrically powered actuators for the existing control levers. The design for drive-by-wire has been conceived allowing for quick conversion back to manual drive mode.
The on-board control scheme incorporates a specially designed intelligent drive module, vision systems, communication module, sensor module and navigation system to enable tele-operation. The system has been designed using interchangeable modules to facilitate easy upgradibility, scalability and maintainability. The communication and control algorithm has been designed to allow for fail safe operations in case of any malfunction or failure, thereby ensuring the safety of the unmanned platform.
The earth mover is remotely controlled from a portable back-pack based controller which houses all the electronics along with the communication radios and power source. The operator console is based on a ruggedized tablet PC with an aesthetically designed Human Machine Interface.
