As the National Mine Action Strategy notes, research on mine clearance has been sorely lacking.
It's a frustration that Federica Mezzani knows well.
Despite the fact that an estimated 110 million mines are still active around the world, they are primarily distributed in poor and war-torn countries.
While NGOs such as the HALO Trust have worked to steadily decontaminate those territories, the research and development has been piecemeal and slow.
Along with her colleagues in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Sapienza University in Rome, set out to prove that new technology could help with this old problem.
There had been some research testing how drones could be used to identify unexploded ordinances, but not much.
Mezzani wanted to take it a step further, dispatching drone swarms equipped with ground-penetrating radar to methodically scan each section of the ground, the way a human team might.
Algorithms could essentially automate mine detection, she believed.
In a series of small-scale experiments, Mezzani's technique worked.
When the full-scale war began, research efforts like Mezzani's were few and far between.
That meant figuring out these strategies from the ground up.
As Bezkaravainyi explains, humanitarian mine clearance operates on a zero-tolerance policy for civilian deaths-if they mark a territory as uncontaminated, they must be absolutely sure it is entirely safe.
Where possible, that also means defusing the land mines instead of exploding them and further contaminating the soil.
This process is significantly slower than how the military clears territory.
Prioritizing speed, the army may blast a path through an active minefield in order to advance quickly without fully clearing it.
To that end, humanitarian mine clearance operates on the Swiss cheese model: applying multiple imperfect strategies on top of each other.
Bezkaravainyi explains that their process normally involves consulting high-resolution satellite imagery of the territory and identifying land mines from the sky.
From there, drones may be dispatched to confirm those locations and identify mines that may be buried or tough to spot.
Teams are dispatched to sweep the territory.
This Cyber News was published on www.wired.com. Publication date: Mon, 19 Feb 2024 07:13:04 +0000