Airborne Detection of Landmines and Unexploded Ordnances with Data Fusion Techniques Using Ground Penetrating Radar and Magnetometer Integrated Unmanned Aerial Systems

Abstract

Detecting and clearing legacy landmines, Improvised Explosive Devices (IED), and Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) using a force made up of humans or animals is extremely risky, labour- and time-intensive. The cost of clearance is estimated to be $300-1000 per mine using conventional techniques, and one person dies for every 5000 mines removed. More than 1,000 deminers have lost their lives or suffered injuries while performing demining operations between 1999 and 2012. All around the world, there are approximately 100 million buried landmines due to low-cost manufacturing and simplicity of deployment across wide regions. 61 states worldwide are severely impacted by the slow demining process. The average number of people killed or maimed annually is 26,000 and 80% of this figure is children. Ten mines are placed for every mine removed, despite recent efforts to reduce their use. Using conventional methods to remove millions of landmines/IDE/UXO would take more than a century with potential risks and high costs, which will have a long-term, significant impact on many nations in a variety of ways.

Landmines are composed of diverse materials, including plastic, glass, wood, and metal, and they come in a range of sizes. Multiple sensors with varying detection abilities can be employed simultaneously to fuse the acquired data instances at a time for better decision-making. Deploying uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with multiple remote sensing modalities seems to expedite humanitarian clearance operations safely and efficiently. In this study, two integrated remote sensing modalities (i.e. ground penetrating radar (GPR) and magnetometer) are mounted on an advanced autonomous UAV (Fig.1) to increase the probability of detection and decrease the false alarm rate using an integrated bespoke android-based tablet application in analysing the fused data in real time.

The performance of the particular modalities was evaluated in field tests in Latvia, Croatia and Cambodia. The full system with the fusion of data obtained from the integrated system has been tested in a landmine field in the UK. The results in the outdoor minefields confirm the viability of the techniques and approaches for detecting legacy landmines efficiently with high accuracy rates. Sensor data fusion has been proven to decrease the number of false alarms for detection. The improved versions of the developed easy-to-use compact technology are aimed to be deployed by humanitarian demining teams to expedite their clearing operations safely and efficiently.