Low-cost quadrotor applied for visual detection of landmine-like objects

This paper presents the use of a low-cost quadrotor applied for visual detection of landmine-like objects. Nowadays, landmines in Colombia are harmful and even letal artifacts mostly abandoned in rural areas. A percentage of the overall number of landmines are hand-crafted and partially exposed on the terrain's surface so that they can be triggered. Based on that fact, we propose an artificial vision approach as a complementary tool for landmine detection. To this purpose, we have developed an open-source software package based on the Robot Operating System (ROS) platform that can be easily: (i) integrated with a low-cost quadrotor such as the AR.drone parrot 2.0 and (ii) applied for real-time visual detection of landmine-like objects (tuna cans). This article describes the ROS-based package called drone detection and the experiments carried out for assessing the detection performance for different type of terrains and landmine visibility.