Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) promotes “the science and practice of humanitarian response worldwide.”

One such project teams an explosive-sniffing mongoose with a therefore cheaper and dumber robot to map landmines in countries so unfortunately afflicted.

Thrishantha Nanayakkara in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, details the training of dwarf mongooses (mongeese? - you knew I’d  rhetorically pose it) to identify C4 explosive. With olfactory sensitivity over 1000 times we humans, the slinky rodents were quite capable - but had to be made willing. Cheese, it eventuated, was a favorite food reward that didn’t overwhelm their noses when learning to sniff the explosives during increasingly difficult testing.

The point of a mongoose is its advantage over dogs, most commonly used. As one learns from Henry Lawson’s The Loaded Dog the slobbering ‘best friend’ is likely to return from the jungle - having executed your edict - with the ticking device clasped (not particularly gently) between their great idiotic jaws.

Mongooses are too light to trigger devices and save the robot needing detection smarts - a considerable research and engineering payload - and can out-sniff a dog.

Thrishantha and colleagues Tharindu Dissanayake, Prasanna Mahipala and K. A. Gayan Sanjaya recently presented this paper on “Human-Animal-Robot Cooperative System for Anti-Personal Mine Detection” based on research at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, a name synonymous with our sorely-missed dear old friend Arthur C. Clarke, its Chancellor from 1979 to 2002.

The team uploaded a video to YouTube showing a tandem pair of “iguana” robots creeping along carrying a metal detector and stuff, being guided by both a mongoose sniffer and the human. 

Mongoose-Robot team for sniffing and marking land mines

A close-up in the video below shows in detail the “semi-autonomous legged robot” traipsing through the undergrowth Iguana-like perhaps, but reminding me more of a Millipede (Diplpoda) in its blind relentless stumble.

Iguana-like legged robot

More information:

* Original presentation paper outlining research

* Thrishantha Nanayakkara’s “Humanitarian Robotics” page

* Thrishantha’s landing page at Harvard - with link to Harvard Humanitarian Initiative

It makes me wonder what humans are thinking [not much, is my chief observation].

Anti-personnel land mines rank amongst the most evil criminal inventions. Their aim is diabolical. As if the military tactical use is not morally-borderline - like the outlawed use of chemical warfare - munitions manufacturers continue to devastate large tracts of poorer countries for decades with unexploded mines. The war ends, the civilians and their descendents pay an endless price.

If you research, manufacture, or sell these things, we’re thinking of you. Not nicely.

Victory first requires deciphering enemy acronyms (DEAs)

Slogans, buzzwords, and acronyms, are essentials of any complex system - denoting a rich culture amongst its cognoscenti - and the military are no slouches in the jargon game.

US Army think-tanks have escalated themselves to leaders of the pack in this skill. In so doing, the common soldier, the human, becomes so abstractly defined as to be indistinguishable from a deployed bipedal field unit, umm, biorobot, err.., cyborg - heck, let the experts speak:

All Soldiers in the Modular Force are part of the Soldier as a System (SaaS) overarching requirement encompassing everything the Soldier wears, carries, and consumes to include unit radios, crew-served weapons, and unit-specific equipment in the execution of tasks and duties.

All Soldiers systems will be treated as an integrated System of Systems (SoS). The Future Combat Systems (FCS) Soldier, as defined by Soldier as a System (SaaS), meets the need to improve the current capability of all Soldiers, regardless of Military Occupational Specialty (MOS), to perform Army Common Tasks and functions more efficiently and effectively.

The "FCS" itself is a glorious acronym-rich obfuscation (ARO) describing a refined system of destruction and killing (RSDK) - preferably of carbon-based units (CBUs), but their techno-lackeys (TLs) can be taken down if robo-jacking (RoJ) proves cost-ineffective (-$).

The Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) network allows the FCS Family-of-Systems (FoS) to operate as a cohesive system-of-systems where the whole of its capabilities is greater than the sum of its parts.

As the key to the Army’s transformation, the network, and its logistics and Embedded Training (ET) systems, enable the Future Force to employ revolutionary operational and organizational concepts. The network enables Soldiers to perceive, comprehend, shape, and dominate the future battlefield at unprecedented levels as defined by the FCS Operational Requirements Document (ORD).

Link to milbot central. PS: Don’t forget to download the wargame. And if you are wondering what on Earth the US Army is up to, try this article on ‘dumbing down the army.’