A war ends but its effects last! Peace agreements may be signed, but landmines and explosive remnants of war are still exists.
It is estimated that there are 110 million landmines in the ground. Mines cost between $3 and $30, but the cost of removing them is $300 to $1000 and one deminer is killed and two injured for every 5000 successfully removed mines.

Robotics systems can provides efficient, reliable and cost effective solutions for landmines problem. Minesweepers is the first international outdoor robotic competition on humanitarian demining that aims at raising the public awareness of the seriousness of landmine contamination and motivating researchers and developers to work on innovative solutions for this serious problem.

The competition is divided into three categories:

• Academia, for graduate or postgraduate students.
• Juniors, for primary and secondary students.
• Industry, a special category for technical companies and startups.

The mission is to detect the anti-personnel landmines. Each participating team will construct a teleoperated or an autonomous unmanned ground or aerial robot that should be able to search for surface-laid and buried landmines and produce automatically a map of the detected objects. The robot has to able to navigate through rough environment that mimics a real minefield.

Once the registration ends, the competitor will be ready to start a new round at Minesweepers:

• Eligibility Round: every team must send by email a technical report and a 3-minutes video showing the design and the operation of their robot.
• Classification Round: every team will play to detect the hidden mines and create mines mapping. The best 8 teams – per category – will be classified for the final round.
• Final Round: the teams will play again and give a presentation to select the winners.

Minesweepers’ 7th edition will take place in conjunction with the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and System (IROS 2018) in Madrid, Spain during October 2 – 5, 2018.

Minesweepers competition invites you to join its journey to find solutions, implement creative and useful ideas and encourage youth to take step forward in changing the world to a landmine free world.

Ref. :

• Alaa Khamis, “Minesweepers: Towards a Landmine-free World,” IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE, December 2015.
• Alaa Khams, “Minesweepers uses robotics’ awesomeness to raise awareness about landmines & explosive remnants of war,” Robohub, February 2015.