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The purpose of this paper is to present the results obtained in the field tests of a new system for detection and location of antipersonnel land mines.

The paper presents briefly the overall system and then it focuses on the description and analysis of the results obtained in three basic experiments: accuracy for following trajectories, mine detection and capability for walking over landmines.

The paper finds that the system has been assessed positively for this specific application because it satisfies the initial system requirements.

The research and experiments have been focused on irregular terrain with low vegetation and free from obstacles. Further research will be focused on the complete coverage of a terrain including large vegetation and obstacles.

This paper presents practical results for a very well defined application: humanitarian de‐mining. However, many of the results related with robot location, following of trajectories and general control techniques are applicable to any mobile robot for outdoor applications in general.

This paper is the first work (to the best author's knowledge) reporting experimental features of a walking system for humanitarian de‐mining. The paper does not only report on the mobile platform, but also on the scanning manipulator and sensor head features.

The paper aims to present a new mechanical scheme for a leg to be included in legged vehicles that simplifies the control actuations along the stride.

The scheme includes three four‐bar links grouped in two mechanisms. The first one decouples the vertical and horizontal foot movements. The second one produces a constant horizontal foot velocity when the corresponding motor is given a constant speed. A hybrid robot with wheels at the end of the hind legs has been simulated and constructed to validate the leg performance.

The gait control requires only five commands for the electronic cards to control the leg. Decoupling vertical and horizontal movements allows a more adequate selection of actuators, a reduction of energy consumption, and higher load capacity and robot velocity. Additional mechanical benefits, such as improved robustness and lower inertia, are obtained. The hind legs can also be articulated, allowing the robot to overcome an obstacle and to climb up and down stairs.

A hybrid robot offers greater stability with respect to a legged robot. This way the lateral movement is not a concern, and therefore it has not been tested yet during the walking cycle.

This new scheme obtains a quasi‐Cartesian behaviour for the foot movement that drastically simplifies the control of the walking cycle. Although the decoupling between movements has already been obtained in previous configurations, these follow a pantograph structure and suffer from blocking problems when they are subject to lateral forces. These schemes were suitable for crab‐like gaits. The proposed leg moves according to a mammal‐like gait.

The aim of this paper is to introduce a hexapod walking robot specifically designed for applications in humanitarian demining, intended to operate autonomously for several hours. To this end, the paper presents an experimental study for the evaluation of its energy efficiency.

First, the interest of using a walking robot for detection and localization of anti-personnel landmines is described, followed by the description of the mechanical system and the control architecture of the hexapod robot. Second, the energy efficiency of the hexapod robot is assessed to demonstrate its autonomy for performing humanitarian demining tasks. To achieve this, the power consumed by the robot is measured and logged, with a number of different payloads placed on-board (always including the scanning manipulator arm assembled on the robot front end), during the execution of a discontinuous gait on flat terrain.

The hexapod walking robot has demonstrated low energy consumption when it is carrying out several locomotion cycles with different loads on it, which is fundamental to have a desired autonomy. It should be considered that the robot has a mass of about 250 kg and that it has been loaded with additional masses of up to 170 kg during the experiments, with a consumption of mean power of 72 W, approximately.

This work provides insight on the use of a walking robot for humanitarian demining tasks, which has high stability and an autonomy of about 3 hours for a robot with high mass and high payload. In addition, the robot can be supervised and controlled remotely, which is an added value when it is working in the field.

Reducing energy consumption in walking robots is an issue of great importance in field applications such as humanitarian demining so as to increase mission time for a given power supply. The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of improving energy efficiency in statically stable walking machines by comparing two leg, insect and mammal, configurations on the hexapod robotic platform SILO6.

Dynamic simulation of this hexapod is used to develop a set of rules that optimize energy expenditure in both configurations. Later, through a theoretical analysis of energy consumption and experimental measurements in the real platform SILO6, a configuration is chosen.

It is widely accepted that the mammal configuration in statically stable walking machines is better for supporting high loads, while the insect configuration is considered to be better for improving mobility. However, taking into account the leg dynamics and not only the body weight, different results are obtained. In a mammal configuration, supporting body weight accounts for 5 per cent of power consumption while leg dynamics accounts for 31 per cent.

As this paper demonstrates, the energy expended when the robot walks along a straight and horizontal line is the same for both insect and mammal configurations, while power consumption during crab walking in an insect configuration exceeds power consumption in the mammal configuration.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new manipulator structure to configure power‐assist devices in order to protect the operator from suffering musculoskeletal disorders. The mechanical structure and the control system along with their main features are presented.

The new structure was designed under the criterion of minimizing the torques required for handling payloads up to 75 kg as well as to configure a system to be controlled easily.

A new structure based on electrical AC motors and capable of handling high payloads exerting low motor torque is provided.

The paper describes how application of the criterion of minimizing the required torques to handle heavy payload produced a new manipulator structure. This structure is patent protected.

Humanitarian de‐mining tasks require the use of specific detecting sets to detect landmines. These sets are normally based on a one‐point sensor, which must be moved over the infested terrain by a combination of a scanning manipulator and a mobile platform. The purpose of this paper is to present the development of the sensor head and the scanning manipulator.

The manipulator needs sensors in order to negotiate ground irregularities and detect obstacles in the path of the mine‐detecting set. All of the sensors must be integrated into a sensor head that is in charge of both detecting land mines and providing overall sensor functions for the mobile platform's steering controller.

The sensor head is based on a commercial mine‐detecting set and a ground‐tracking set based on a network of range sensors tailor‐made for this purpose; the scanning manipulator is based on a mechanism with five degrees of freedom.

The design assessment and some experiments are reported.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the design of a training tool intended to improve deminers' technique during close‐in detection tasks.

Following an introduction that highlights the impact of mines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and the importance of training for enhancing the safety and the efficiency of the deminers, this paper considers the utilization of a sensory tracking system to study the skill of the hand‐held detector expert operators. With the compiled information, some critical performance variables can be extracted, assessed, and quantified, so that they can be used afterwards as reference values for the training task. In a second stage, the sensory tracking system is used for analysing the trainee skills. The experimentation phase aims to test the effectiveness of the elements that compose the sensory system to track the hand‐held detector during the training sessions.

The proposed training tool will be able to evaluate the deminers' efficiency during the scanning tasks and will provide important information for improving their competences.

This paper highlights the need of introducing emerging technologies for enhancing the current training techniques for deminers and proposes a sensory tracking system that can be successfully utilised for evaluating trainees' performance with hand‐held detectors.

An energetic model for walking robots based on both dynamic and actuator models is proposed in this paper. While applied to walking machines, this method allows the evaluation of the influence of leg configuration, body weight, and gait parameters on power consumption. The model is validated by using genetic algorithms to identify the unknown parameters, which enables it to be used as a tool to evaluate and optimize the performance of a legged robot configuration according to the power consumption. This method has been applied to find the optimum stride length for the minimum energy expenditure of a biped prototype depending on the speed and payload, considering both level and slope walking.

The purpose of this paper is to propose going one step further in the simulation tools related to agriculture by integrating fleets of mobile robots for the execution of precision agriculture techniques. The proposed new simulation environment allows the user to define different mobiles robots and agricultural implements.

With this computational tool, the crop field, the fleet of robots and the different sensors and actuators that are incorporated into each robot can be configured by means of two interfaces: a configuration interface and a graphical interface, which interact with each other.

The system presented in this article unifies two very different areas – robotics and agriculture – to study and evaluate the implementation of precision agriculture techniques in a 3D virtual world. The simulation environment allows the users to represent realistic characteristics from a defined location and to model different variabilities that may affect the task performance accuracy of the fleet of robots.

This simulation environment, the first in incorporating fleets of heterogeneous mobile robots, provides realistic 3D simulations and videos, which grant a good representation and a better understanding of the robot labor in agricultural activities for researchers and engineers from different areas, who could be involved in the design and application of precision agriculture techniques. The environment is available at the internet, which is an added value for its expansion in the agriculture/robotics family.

Explains how the Automatic Control Department of the Instituto de Automatica Industrial (CSIC) in Madrid, Spain has been developing robots for over 15 years. This activity began in the 1980s with the realization of industrial robots and then the department focused its attention on the area of robots for hostile/hazardous environments. Describes several achievements in this field including a complex tele‐operated system for steam generator inspection and maintenance in nuclear power plants; a tele‐manipulator for servicing a new concept of urban infrastructures; a self‐propelling climbing robot with magnetic feet; and a four‐legged walking robot for hazardous environments.