Variety of contraband
Alongside all the benefits countries get from trade, there are also the unwelcome packages that smugglers and criminals sneak into cargo loads, such as drugs, explosives, counterfeit money and increasingly human traffic. The time and tools required to look for the sheer variety of illegal contraband is a major problem for local police agencies but a team from the University of Sheffield are developing a solution – a robot ‘ferret’.

Different detection methods
‘It won’t look very much like a ferret,’ explains research leader, Dr Tony Dodd from the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, ‘but it’s a ferret in that it ferrets around the container. Our first idea is a robot with magnetic wheels, because normally there’s a small space above the cargo container. It will drive along the ceiling upside down, searching around, and its sensors can detect the presence of different types of contraband.’ Currently he explains, methods used by police include dogs to sniff out drugs, or probes for carbon dioxide to detect people, or radar-type machines to look through containers. Dogs need to be trained, often only detect one type of drug, and can only work in quite short shifts, ‘we hope to be able to detect a number of different things with a single robot,’ says Dodd.

Sensor
They intend to do this with a sensor. Whether its drugs or explosives, each of these will give off a vapour. They are exploring an idea based on laser and fibre optic devices. ‘The idea,’ says Dodd, ‘is that the properties of the lasers and fibre optics, the frequency wavelengths, vary in the presence of particles from different substances. We can design them so that if a particle attaches itself to the fibre optic it reacts in a certain way, the frequency changes and it almost acts as a fingerprint, for example, for heroin.’ They have a prototype designed and are looking to build it in the next couple of months. ‘The key is trying to make it autonomous,’ says Dodd, ‘so ideally customs officers can put it inside a cargo container, it will go around on the ceiling, come back, and be able to report the presence of contraband. Then the border agents will know whether it’s worth completely unpacking the container.’