Conclusions
The CLEARPath system simplifies the hazardous area clearance process for humanitarian demining NGOs by delegating area clearance information and communication to a network of RaspberryPi-GPS-LoRa nodes. These constant information updates lend to increased clearance efficiency by preventing area re-clearance and directly assigning responsibility for safety and human life to individual NGOs. This system has the potential to most positively impact rural communities in heavily-mined developing nations by creating a database of cleared areas to provide to local leaders and landowners. Landmines and UXO remain obstacles to human life in that they deny access to arable land and therefore sustenance for their families and communities. Landmines and UXO also present mortal danger to the communities that attempt to cultivate this same land. Overall, the CLEARPath system is a single step towards a modern solution for disposing of the remnants of war –left by the United States –to improve the lives of people around the world.
Limitations
After continued use outside, we found our weakest link was the AdaFruit Ultimate GPS module v3 as it was susceptible to moisture and the elements. Both of our modules eventually broke over the course of the project due to subjection to ambient moisture or rain, despite us being as careful as possible.
The Kalman filter was designed assuming a constant velocity model, and very simple measurement and process noise matrices. This model does fairly well at modeling movement in an open environment, but struggles in areas where there are more obstacles in the environment.
Future Work
- Additional optimization of the GPS Processing algorithms, including adding acceleration into the Kalman filter and tuning the hyperparameters in each implementation.
- Adding repeater functionality into the network, so that each node will automatically repeat the data received from all other nodes.
- Using a more robust MIMO antenna scheme to enable near-constant stream communication without the use of the current finite-state-machine system.
- Implementing enhanced security measures during communication to protect against hacking threats.
- Increase robustness of hardware to withstand harsh field conditions such as rain and collisions.