A drone with 5 degrees of freedom can safely detect buried objects from the air:
Metal detecting can be a fun hobby, or it can be a task to be completed in deadly earnest—if the buried treasure you're searching for includes land mines and explosive remnants of war. This is an enormous, dangerous problem: Something like 12,000 square kilometers worldwide are essentially useless and uninhabitable because of the threat of buried explosives, and thousands and thousands of people are injured or killed every year.
[...] Because the majority of mines are triggered by pressure or direct proximity, it may seem that a drone would be the ideal way to detect them nonexplosively. However, unless you're only detecting over a perfectly flat surface (and perhaps not even then) your detector won't be positioned ideally most of the time, and you might miss something, which is not a viable option for mine detection.
But now a novel combination of a metal detector and a drone with 5 degrees of freedom is under development at the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich. It may provide a viable solution to remote land-mine detection, by using careful sensing and localization along with some twisting motors to keep the detector reliably close to the ground.
[...] The drone used in this research is made by a company called Voliro, and it's a tricopter that uses rotating thruster nacelles that move independently of the body of the drone. It may not shock you to learn that Voliro (which has, in the past, made some really weird flying robots) is a startup with its roots in the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, the same place where the mine-detecting drone research is taking place.
[...] Testing with metallic (nonexplosive) targets showed that this system does very well, even in areas with obstacles, overhead occlusion, and significant slope. Whether it's ultimately field-useful or not will require some further investigation, but because the platform itself is commercial, off-the-shelf hardware, there's a bit more room for optimism than there otherwise might be.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Friday March 24, @09:55PM
Of course, each drone is only likely to find one landmine in its useful life—unless the landmines are grouped closely together.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday March 24, @10:20PM (5 children)
Are all land mines made with metal these days?
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday March 24, @10:36PM (2 children)
Is anybody still deploying them? Unless you're in a scorched earth situation where you don't want the land too ever be used again, landmines are counterproductive as the clean up is hard.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday March 24, @11:22PM
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(Score: 4, Informative) by richtopia on Friday March 24, @11:29PM
Very much so. Anti-tank mines are being deployed in Ukraine by both sides. Ukraine has had lots of success using artillery deployed AT mines to stop retreating vehicles: a column heading down a road encounters an ambush, and counter-intuitively the road that the Russians approached from now has mines. I haven't read much in the way of anti-personnel mines in the conflict; the geographic nature of Ukraine makes them less impactful (large open fields are already difficult enough for infantry to cross).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Anti-Armor_Mine_System [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 24, @10:56PM (1 child)
That's my question, and thought. For a crude mine, you don't need much metal at all, just a flint and striker, or maybe a primer. The striker for a primer fired IED need not be metal, even. You can easily replace metal fragments with glass, if you're using them as antipersonnel weapons. Antitank or antiarmor would probably require more metal, but, the case probably need not be metal. And, with slave labor available, you could probably get the casings made of rock anyway.
I thought trained rats were the real heroes of land mining operations. They smell the explosive, which can't be eliminated. Antipersonnel, or antiarmor, shaped charge or just an area explosive, they all have explosive charges inside.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26, @10:54AM
Rats work well and I bet fewer false positives than metal detection.
(Score: 2) by Username on Sunday March 26, @01:35PM
Wouldn't rolling the ground with heavy machinery set them off or crush them into non functional scrap?
Metal detecting seems like a wild goose chase.