普通高中课程标准实验教科书英语选修高二下选修7 Unit 2 Robots - Reading task
LANDMINES KILL OR BADLY INJURE around 26,000 people every year. That is one person every 20 minutes. What is worse is that they keep causing damage for decades after wars have ended. There are about 100 million landmines buried just beneath the surface of the ground in 60 countries. Most of the victims are innocent people - women, children, farmers - who happen to step on them as they go about their daily lives.
By Natasha Wesley
We seem to be losing the fight against landmines. While, every year, about 100,000 landmines are removed, 2,000,000 more are buried in the ground. Removing them is very slow and dangerous work that must be done by hand. Someone has to use a metal detector to find the mines. This is very inaccurate as the metal detector finds all metal objects, not just the mines, and it does not find new types of mine which are covered in plastic. Then he or she has to dig the mine out without setting it off. Using this method it could take centuries to rid the world of landmines.
This is where robotics comes in. Several countries are working on technological solutions to the landmines problem. As part of Japan's support for finding and removing landmines in Afghanistan, Japanese scientists and engineers have been researching into robotics. One of the most exciting projects is at Chiba University, where a robot that looks something like an insect is being developed. It is 4 metres long, 1.8 metres wide, 1 metre high, and weighs 900 kilograms, about the size of a small car. It walks on 6 legs and when it finds a mine, it marks the spot with paint and sends data to a computer which can then map the mines. As well as being much safer than finding mines by hand, the insect robot is also much faster.
The university is also experimenting with the robot so that it can use radar to search for plastic mines. The goal is for the computer to use the data it receives to determine not only whether an object is just a piece of metal or a mine, but also what type of mine it is. The researchers hope that mass production of robots will start in the next year or so and they will be used in such countries as Afghanistan and Cambodia.
In the 1990s world opinion built up against the use of landmines and, in 1997, 122 countries signed an agreement in Ottawa, Canada, to stop the manufacture and use of landmines. However, the task of clearing mines is still a very difficult one. Perhaps robotics Will provide a solution, but as every 20minutes goes by, one more person is killed or badly injured.
