J Intell Robot Syst https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-017-0654-y A Highly-Maneuverable Demining Autonomous Robot: an Over-Actuated Design Mohammad A. Jaradat 1,2 · Muath Bani-Salim 3 · Fahed Awad 4 Received: 21 June 2015 / Accepted: 19 May 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017 Abstract Based on the well-known advantages of using an over-actuated mechanism for robots, this research pro- poses a holonomic highly-maneuverable autonomous robot design for demining service applications. The proposed approach provides an interesting compromise between the design requirements of the demining robot applications and the over-actuated autonomous robots. The robot body is mainly divided into two parts: the first part provides the robot with its required locomotion and it consists of a driv- ing/steering subsystem with four driving wheels (4WD), four steering mechanisms (4SW), and a passive suspen- sion subsystem. The second part is a manipulator with three degrees of freedom that is designed based on two parallelogram mechanisms. The proposed design insures many advantages over existing designs, including stabil- ity, maneuverability, autonomous navigation, and simplicity of the control effort constraints. The robot model and its corresponding stability analysis were conducted and sim- ulated in order to evaluate the motion of the robot over different environments rough terrains and slanted surfaces.  Mohammad A. Jaradat mjaradat@aus.edu 1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates 2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Jordan University of Science & Technology, Irbid, Jordan 3 Sustainable Energy Systems Engineering Department, Texas A&M University-Kingsville (TAMUK), Kingsville, USA 4 Department of Network Engineering & Security, Jordan University of Science & Technology, Irbid, Jordan Moreover, a prototype of the proposed robot was developed and built and different types of sensors were used in order to help it take precise actuation decisions for navigation and control. The prototype was experimentally tested for dif- ferent scenarios and environments in order to validate the proposed design. The testing results demonstrated decent performance of the robot in autonomous navigation and in localizing the detected objects. Keywords Over-actuated robot · Autonomous demining robot mechanism 1 Introduction Antipersonnel mines may exist in any environment near human beings, endangering their well-being and threaten- ing their lives. In practice, it is known to be more difficult to detect and remove landmines, especially in unstructured environments or close to crop fields. According to the United Nations statistics, more than 100 million landmines exist in more than 60 countries causing 10,000 casualties and 20,000 injuries annually [1]. The cost of mine clearance is greater than the budget of poor countries that suffer from mines. In addition, the mine removal operation is usually performed manually, which is a very slow and dangerous process. Therefore, demining robots have become a very viable alternative to perform such dangerous task instead of humans. However, demining robot must fulfill certain design criteria to be efficient. 1.1 Design Criteria for Demining Robots Based on the state-of-the-art of developed solutions for demining robots [2–11, 16, 17, 20, 21, 27, 30–33], some of