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45 soil moisture readings. Data processing accounts for variations in atmospheric pressure, humidity and the intensity of incoming cosmic rays. The current sensors are large, static units, but Thorvald will allow them to be used across a much wider area. This will allow Thorvald to measure soil moisture patterns in a grid with 10 metre square pixels. The sensor is placed on the ground and can provide a reading from the whole 100 m 2 pixel and down to a depth of 15-40cm, depending on the type of soil. That gives a much higher resolution measurement than is currently possible. “We think this is the future of agricultural robotics, and can be a key innovative step in farming,” says Pearson. Mining The Badger project is developing an autonomous robotic system that can drill, manoeuvre, localise, map and navigate underground with tools to construct horizontal and vertical networks of stable bores and pipelines.  The system can be used for a wide range of applications, from cabling and pipe installations, geotechnical investigations, large-scale irrigation installations, search-and-rescue operations, remote science and exploration, and defence applications. To do this, Badger will have to integrate innovative mechatronic concepts with robust industrial drilling tools. New imaging, navigation and mapping techniques will be developed over the three years of the project to sense, map and interpret the surrounding underground environment. The system will merge collected underground data with legacy digital maps to plan and track the motion of the robot with respect to physical landmarks. The robotic system’s actions and reactions will be governed by a cognition component that makes decisions on task execution, path planning and motion planning. The robotic system will be able to manage and intelligently combine the large amounts of data gathered during underground operation to continuously improve its perception and cognition abilities. It will also provide human users with the means to store, process and analyse that data, enabling offline planning and online remote monitoring and control of the overall operation process. The project is led by the University of Madrid with equipment makers Robotnik Automation in Spain and Tracto Teknik (TT) in Germany. TT develops a pneumatically driven ‘mole’ that works its way through the ground, displacing and compacting the spoil into the surrounding soil. This can be used for tunnels up to 30 m long and 160 mm in diameter for pipes, and may well form the basis of the Badger system. Meanwhile, Sitech in Western Australia has developed a collision detection system for unmanned mining systems using GNSS hardware from Trimble. Sitech provides large track-type tractors for mines in Western Australia where there are risks of machines colliding with each other, for example in a dusty environment, machines operating under a conveyor or operating over the draw points where ore is brought out of the mine. To eliminate these risks to workers, one mine operator retrofitted remote control systems to these machines, and is now adding a collision detection system called SiTrack. Each remotely operated machine, along with the conveyor system, has been fitted with Trimble SPS855 and SPS555H GNSS receivers. These are connected to a local-site base station, delivering RTK (real-time kinematic) corrections over wi-fi to improve the positioning accuracy to a few centimetres. The receivers give an exact location and heading of the dozers along with the conveyor. The position data is fed back over wi-fi to a central computer in the control room where custom software compares the locations of the vehicles and predicts their trajectories. This provides data for four levels of alert, from green status (meaning no collisions) to red, meaning a collision is imminent. The collision could be between dozers, a dozer and the stacker or a dozer and a draw point. A remote operator monitoring this status could quickly stop a machine before a collision occurred. Mine clearance The Digger Foundation, based in Switzerland, is using a combination of dogs and a remotely operated mine clearance system to locate and remove unexploded bombs in urban areas. The 12 tonne Digger D-250 is an armoured caterpillar system that is already being used to find and trigger mines in open areas. Dogs have been used for humanitarian de-mining for more than ten years, with great success and no dog fatalities. Their ability to smell explosives has no technological equivalent at the moment, but their range and coverage has always been limited because they have to UGVs | Insight Unmanned Systems Technology | February/March 2017 The Thorvald system includes a sensor that counts fast neutrons from cosmic rays that can be converted into soil moisture readings