Not Only for Killing: Drones Are Now Detecting Land Mines in Ukraine

With a stiff gait, a drone canine stomped up and down a makeshift minefield astatine a U.S. Army investigating halfway successful Virginia, shuddering erstwhile it neared a plate-size puck meant to simulate an anti-tank explosive. On its backmost was a stack of cameras, GPS devices, radios and thermal imaging exertion that subject developers anticipation volition assistance it observe mines astatine adjacent range, sparing humans from that unsafe task.

For the astir part, the canine appeared to cognize erstwhile to enactment distant from the mock mine, fixed the artificial quality embedded successful its strategy to place threats. “Mostly it does, but sometimes it doesn’t,” Kendall V. Johnson, a physicist astatine the countermine part of the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, said during a objection this summertime extracurricular Washington. “That’s thing we’re moving connected currently.”

The drone canine is among a fistful of emerging technologies successful anti-mine warfare — a tract that, until now, experts accidental had not changed overmuch successful the past 50 years. But conscionable arsenic drones, which are mostly defined arsenic uncrewed machines, not exclusively aircraft, that are piloted remotely, person proved successful Ukraine to beryllium an important violative limb successful modern fighting, they present whitethorn besides supply defense, with caller and safer ways to observe and wide onshore mines.

As successful truthful galore areas now, artificial quality is driving the progress. Fenix, for example, has developed bundle enabling drones to not lone spot and place types of onshore mines, but besides foretell wherever they mightiness lie. It does that by drafting connected open-source quality and societal media reports from conflicts astir the satellite wherever subject units person laid mines oregon wherever rockets person delivered scatterable munitions.