Drones often get a suspicious side-eye from
people worried about issues such as privacy
and air safety. But a new extension of drone
technology save lives all over the world.
A group working out of the Netherlands is
developing a land mine-sweeping drone. Despite
ongoing global efforts to ban antipersonnel
land mines, they’re still used in many countries.
They’ve been a common part of warfare since
the 1930s. But when wars and conflicts end,
it’s not as though those explosive devices
evaporate. They remain, underground and unmarked,
ready to detonate. In 2014, there were a total
of 3,678 recorded land mine detonations – and
those are just the ones we know about. Nearly
80 percent of those who were injured or killed
in those blasts were civilians, and nearly
40 percent of those civilians were children.
In recent news, even the wildly popular Pokemon
Go game has been affected: players in Bosnia
have been warned about mines left over from
conflicts in the 1990s. Getting rid of all
that ordinance is no small task, and it’s
dangerous. Current methods of removal involve
sniffer animals, human deminers with metal
detectors, or large detonation vehicles. Those
methods can be slow, costly, and come with
high risk. Enter the mine-sweeping drone.
This isn’t the first time project founder
Massoud Hassani and his team have built a
robot to get rid of land mines. In 2013, they
created a device called Mine Kafon. It’s
sort of like a robotic tumbleweed – it rolls
through mine fields, and when it finds one,
it blows up both itself and the mine. Now,
the Mine Kafon team has developed a drone-based
mine eradicator that will further reduce both
the cost and risk of demining. It uses a series
of modular robotic attachments that can be
interchanged. First, the Mine Kafon Drone
uses a mapping system attachment to make a
3-D map of the designated area. Then, a metal
detector is attached, and it uses that plus
GPS to locate and identify mine locations.
In the final step, the metal detector is swapped
for a robotic gripping arm which carefully
places detonators on identified mines. The
mines are triggered and eliminated, and the
drone can move on to its next location. Right
now, the Mine Kafon Foundation is running
a Kickstarter so they can finish development
and start testing the technology in the field.
The project is ambitious – Hassani has a
goal to eradicate all mines on the planet
in the space of 10 years. But according to
the Kickstarter pitch, this method is 20 times
faster at ferreting out and detonating mines,
and at a cost 200 times cheaper than existing
technologies.
So, would you use drone power for good or
evil? Or just to bring yourself snacks? Get
in touch and let us know. And to get more
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