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We have developed and used a mobile robot for removing ammunition boxes containing explosive fuzes from
a storage room to the disposal site at Ordnance Factory Khamaria, Jabalpur. The robot comprises a six-
wheeled vehicle carrying an articulated manipulator. It is controlled and monitored remotely through wire-
less Ethernet from a host workstation. The robot and a pneumatic device for opening the box, have been used to
remove and destroy fuze boxes remotely. This note provides a description of the problem that warranted this
development. It also describes the hardware and software components of the mobile robot that solved the
problem.
About 300 boxes containing more than measuring 600 mm × 250 mm × 320 mm (Engineers), Pune2,3 – a DRDO laboratory –
13,000 rejected fuzes of anti-tank mines and 645 mm × 200 mm × 345 mm res- and handed over to the Indian Army for
were lying in two storage rooms at pectively. They are made up of 1 mm thick field trial. Although most of these robots
Ordnance Factory Khamaria (OFK), Jabal- steel and each box has a body, lid, spring- have the basic features for remote driving
pur for the last 25 years. Because of the clip, hinge, handle-clip, stud and strength- of the vehicle and handling of materials
peculiar chemical composition of these ening plate. The lid is retained in position with on-board manipulator, none of them
fuzes, as well as past experience with them, by two spring clips. Maximum weight of is big enough to have necessary reach
there was a fear that some of these may a box with its content is 20 kg. and payload, and at the same time small
have become sensitive and may explode We had to build a robot to remotely enough to drive on the over-bridge, turn
at the slightest disturbance. Their presence remove a box from the stacks, bring it to at its corners and enter the storage rooms.
in the factory premises was a threat to disposal site A along the road and over- A custom design of a robot for this appli-
the people, factory and the surroundings. bridge, open the spring-clip of the box cation by any of these manufacturers
It was clear that these boxes had to be and pour its fuzes into a pit for disposal. would have been prohibitively expensive.
removed and disposed at the earliest. To This had to be done carefully to avoid This prompted us to work towards an in-
avoid possible injury or loss of life due any possibility of explosion. digenous solution.
to accidents during manual handling of
these boxes, it was desired that the boxes
be handled remotely by robotic means. Available technologies Robot system for remote operation
Based on a request from the Centre for
Fire, Environment and Explosive Safety Robots for Explosive Ordnance Disposal As a solution to the problem posed above,
(CFEES), Delhi, we developed a battery- (EOD) 1 are manufactured and sold all we proceeded to build a mobile robot
powered mobile platform with an on-board over the world. Of them, the Mark and An- with on-board manipulator for remotely
manipulator for remotely removing the dros series of EOD robots from Remotec, approaching the stacks of fuze boxes in
boxes to a disposal site. By end of December USA are well known. These have been the storage room, grip a box on the stack,
2006, all boxes were removed and dis- extensively used by the US Army during lift and place it on a box-holder frame on
posed. This is a unique indigenous effort the last decade. Solem and Talon from the vehicle, and then carry the box to the
in developing a robotic solution for a haz- Foster Miller, USA; HOBO from Ken- disposal site. The control station was set
ardous operation. tree, Ireland; TSR from Cybernetix, up at room no. 1103, as it is protected by
France; Cyclops from AB Precision, UK, traverse and is sufficiently close to the
Description of the problem and Teodor and Robert from Telerob, storage room and disposal pit for uninter-
Germany are also well-known EOD robots. rupted wireless communication. Full-
The site layout is shown in Figure 1 a. Most of these robots are big, heavy and scale mock-up facility was set up in room
The fuze boxes containing rejected fuzes expensive. They are meant to be used in no. 221 to test and qualify the operation
were stacked (1.5 m high) in two adjoining war fronts for de-mining and other simi- of the scheme.
rooms, 224 and 225 (Figure 1 b). There is lar operations. Smaller EOD robots are We also developed a pneumatic device
an over-bridge running through the cen- also available to detect and defuse Im- for remotely removing the spring-clip
tre of this area till the disposal site A. provized Explosive Devices (IED) in air- and then tilting the box to pour its con-
Narrow, cemented pathways connect the ports, aircrafts, auditoria and even under tent into the disposal pit. Both the robot
over-bridge to the individual storage rooms. vehicles. They usually have accessories and the unclipping device were to be op-
There are traverses (raised earth wall for remote on-line X-ray imaging of the erated remotely from the control station.
serving as protection against accidental suspected device, and guns (disruptors) The robot was connected to the control
explosion) separating the rooms from the for defusing the device using a water-jet room PC through wireless Ethernet. The
over-bridge. or other means. Recently, an EOD robot operator sitting in control room can
There were mainly two types of boxes has been successfully developed by Re- watch video images received from wire-
in the storage rooms: C18A and C374, search and Development Establishment less cameras mounted on the mobile
tion in data transmission and reception. manipulator is designed to grip and carry the mobile platform. The interface provides
Any corrupted command packets re- a payload of at most 30 kg weight. It is facilities for driving the platform for-
ceived are ignored. controlled by a micro-controller-based ward, backward and about itself. There is
2. Receives, interprets and executes system similar to the controller of the provision for executing the turn-in-place
commands: The controller executes mobile platform. of the platform by specified angles. In addi-
commands for parameter setting, transla- The server program for the manipula- tion, the interface also provides informa-
tional and rotational motions at desired tor is based on similar principles and carries tion regarding the charging condition of
velocities and motions through desired out tasks similar to that of SmartROD. the battery, position and orientation of the
distances and angles of rotation. The in- The controller executes commands for platform as computed from encoder pulses
cremental encoder pulses are available as motion of each joint at specified speeds. of drive motors, and line map of the area
feedback to the controller. The DC motor Commands are also available for the mo- in front of the platform based on LRF
drives are interfaced to the controller tion of each joint through desired angles. data.
through a DAC. End-of-travel sensors are provided at all The graphical interface is so designed
3. Sends periodic server information joints for safe operation. that either the vehicle or the manipulator
packets to the SBC: The controller pro- The motions of the manipulator are can be operated at any given time. The
gram sends Server Information Packets carried out using video feedback from vehicle control screen has a button to
(SIP) to the SBC every 100 ms. The SIP one on-board camera and a set of fixed bring in the manipulator control window.
contains data regarding the operation status cameras in the room. Some joint motions This window provides facilities for control
of the mobile platform. These include the are provided with visual indexing using of each joint of the manipulator at different
current velocities of both sets of wheels, laser pointers and cross-hair combina- speeds and through different angles. Ad-
position and orientation of the platform, tion. Information received from the ditionally, this window also provides in-
charging status of battery, bumper status, microcontroller is used by the HMI formation on each joint angle of the
sonar range data, etc. This information window for display and alarm genera- manipulator and status of the correspond-
received from the controller is used by tion. ing end-of-travel sensors. The controls are
HMI application for display and alarm transferred to the vehicle control window
generation. Host machine interface for control on exit from the manipulator control
and monitor screen.
The SmartROD graphical interface also
Control architecture of Figure 5 a and b shows the graphical in- has buttons for the control of PTZ opera-
manipulator terface on the host computer for the remote tions of the onboard cameras. These are
operation of SmartROD. There is a but- accessible during both vehicle and mani-
The manipulator has four degrees of ton to connect to SmartROD for a session pulator operations. There are emergency
freedom and a motorized gripper. All and disconnect at the end of the session. stop buttons for both vehicle and mani-
joints are driven by stepper motors. The Figure 5 a shows the interface for operating pulator control.
Summary considering that altogether 300 boxes 5. Shamah, B., Report, CMU-RI-TR-99-06,
were to be disposed. As the disposal team 1999.
A SmartRod mobile robot with on-board gathered confidence after the disposal of 6. Richardson, T., Wood, K. R. and Hopper,
a few boxes, multiple boxes were disposed- A., IEEE Internet Comput., 1998, 2, 33–38.
manipulator was tested extensively for its
designated operation and demonstrated to off together, thus speeding up the opera-
the Ordnance Factory Task Force mem- tion considerably. As the operations pro- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. Our colleague
bers at BARC, Mumbai in January 2006. gressed, it became evident that the fuzes P. L. Sahu contributed in the design and de-
After shipping the system to OFK Ja- were not as sensitive as originally envis- velopment of the vehicle and the manipulator.
balpur in March 2006, and mockup trials aged. Loading of the boxes on the loading R. Sahu and others from the workshop did the
at site, the Task Force members slightly tray was carried out manually to further fabrication, assembly and testing of the robot.
modified the procedure for disposal. Ear- speed-up the operations. The entire opera- Biswajit Das conducted several tests, mock-
lier it was planned to pour the fuzes into tion was over by the end of December ups and the actual operation at site. Members
a pit after opening the ammunition box. 2006. In retrospect we feel that it was the of OFK, Jabalpur and CFEES, Delhi extended
initial fear and uncertainty in handling all possible support for successful operation
As there is a potential danger of fuze ex-
of the robot.
plosion during pouring, it was decided to the fuze boxes that was mainly overcome
dispose (burn) the fuzes within the am- by the use of the robot. This in itself was
Received 30 April 2007; accepted 14 May
munition box. So in the revised proce- the most important contribution that came 2007
dure, the ammunition box had to be from the use of the robotic device.
transported by SmartROD to the disposal
site after opening its lid. A sloping ce- 1. http://www.army-technology.com/contractors/ P. K. Pal*, K. Jayarajan, D. D. Ray,
mented pathway leading to the disposal mines/ Manjit Singh, B. Sony, V. K. Shrivastava,
site was specially constructed for this 2. Hazra, B., In Proceedings of the National A. N. Jha, R. V. Sakrikar, Durgesh
purpose. Seminar on Unmanned Ground Vehicles, Mishra and V. V. Agashe are in the Divi-
After many trial runs of the robot from Ahmednagar, 2006. sion of Remote Handling and Robotics,
3. Mukherjee, A., In Proceedings of the Na- Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai
the mock-up room to the disposal site,
tional Seminar on Unmanned Ground Ve-
actual operation was initiated in October 400 085, India; Parag Taktawala is in
hicles, Ahmednagar, 2006.
2006. Each cycle of operation of the ro- 4. Pal, P. K., Kar, A., Mittal, A., Ray, D. D.,
Zenn Systems, Ahmedabad 380 006, India;
bot took about an hour. Since burning of Jayarajan, K. and Singh, M., In Proceed- Vivek Mahadev is in the Seismology
fuzes in the pit takes several hours, on an ings of the National Conference on Ad- Division, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre,
average only three boxes could be dis- vanced Manufacturing and Robotics, Mumbai 400 085, India.
posed in a day. That was rather slow Durgapur, 2004. *e-mail: pkpal@barc.gov.in