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There is increasing consensus on the fact that landmines heavily affect the development of contaminated countries and that mine action activities need to be integrated into general development initiatives. There is also general acknowledgment that machines have fallen short of expectations: only few are actually employed in the field and are often down for maintenance, waiting for spare parts or for experienced technicians to fix them coming from abroad. These reasons are at the base of the idea of adapting commercially available power tillers to demining applications. Different modules attachable to the powertiller, modified to be the tractor unit, have been designed in a participatory way together with deminers. In fact, we believe that involving deminers in the whole design process would allow them to get familiar with the innovation process, which is a key component of the development process, and would help to create a machine closer to real needs, made of materials available locally and therefore with greater chance of success. The project presented here therefore focuses on the participatory design and development of a new small machine for helping to remove landmines in the Vanni region in Sri Lanka, where landmines are of the small plastic type containing approximately 50g of TNT. The whole work encompasses the creation of four modules: tractor unit, ground processing tool, vegetation cutting tool, and the control unit to drive the machine from the safe distance of 20m. The tractor unit is the power tiller modified to resist possible explosions of landmines underneath and adapted to the remote control, while the ground processing tool is the means by which landmines are lifted up on the soil surface to facilitate later hand removal by deminers. The ground processing tool is placed on the front of the machine, to allow landmines to be removed before the tractor unit passes over them. The vegetation cutting module can be attached on the front of the machine when vegetation is too thick for the machine to pass through. It is powered by the power tiller engine and is supported by the same supporting frame of the ground processing tool. This chapter analyses the currently available cost-effective technologies on the demining market, before presenting the power tiller idea and the participatory methodology used for

Power Tillers for Demining in Sri Lanka: Participatory Design of Low-cost Technology