Discussions

Hi All,

I'd like to open a forum on a project i've been working on for quite some time.

To date there are around 110M landmines in the ground in 78 countries including Europe, killing tens of thousands a year. The removal of landmines is slow, dangerous, and costly.

Currently there is no way to rapidly detect landmines over a large area of land, I find this difficult to swallow given the advances in UAV technology. De-miners must go meter by meter and manually detect and then remove the mines. This takes huge amounts of time and means having to cover areas that do not have mines. In the past 5 years less than 1000 km2 worldwide were cleared of mines. If de-mining continue at the current pace it will take 1100yrs to remove all the landmines. Why can't we change this? the tech is cheap and within reach, but to my knowledge there hasn't been any significant effort to repurpose a UAV for landmine signature detection. I believe as a community we can change this using:

• Multispectral camera to spot the erosion created by the decomposition of the chemical elements in a mine.

• LiDAR scanner for data driven ground sign detection.
• EOS sensor for pattern recognition when device is on the surface.
• Magnetic sensors for high metal content sub surface detection.
• GPR for low metal content below surface detection. http://en.okm-detection.be/gepard-gpr/

There are many ways to start this research practically, starting from a simple application of a multi rotor carrying a LiDAR sensor for accurate alt hold with a duel sensor mine shark in the bottom of if(http://www.gaconsultingsrl.com/collaborations/cses/niitek/mineshark-handheld-dual-sensor/).

I would like for discussions on how we think it could be achieved. Lets have at it!

Kind Regards

Matt