NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Explosives Detection

Abstract

As of 2017, there are an estimated 100 million abandoned land mines littered across 61 countries. Following the wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, there has been a rise in casualties due to the triggering of previously-abandoned explosive devices. The above institutions combined specialties to develop a remotely-operable, multisensor, robotic device for the detection of land mines, UXO (1), and IEDs (2). The robotic detection device uses novel subsurface radar with imaging and target classification to differentiate between threatening landmines and innocuous clutter. The expected outcome of this research is the creation of a multi-sensor system on a semi-autonomous vehicle for detection and discrimination of explosive devices. This robotic platform will change the approach to detecting landmines in post-war zones, all the meanwhile lessening direct human-to-mine or animal-to-mine contact in detecting landmines. Architecture has a high potential to move the procedures of explosive detection toward completely remote and autonomous system.