An estimated 110 million landmines, mostly antipersonnel mines laid in over 60 countries, kill or maim over 26 000 people a year. One of the dilemmas for removing landmines is the amount of false alarms in a typical minefield. Broadband electromagnetic induction spectroscopy (EMIS) is a promising technology that can both detect and identify buried objects as landmines. By reducing the number of...

Under the Range Rule (1997), the Department of Defense defines unexploded ordnance (UXO) as a piece of ordnance that has been deployed, but has not exploded. This study investigated a subset of UXO including artillery shells and mortars (projectiles), but excluding landmines. UXO contaminates approximately 15 million acres of land in the United States alone. The geophysical tools most frequentl...

Unexploded ordnance (UXO) is a source of concern at several U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) sites. Localization of munitions and fate and transport of the explosive compounds from these munitions are a major issue of concern. A set of laboratory experiments were conducted in specially designed flux chambers to measure the evaporative flux of three explosive compounds (2,4-dinitrotoluene, 2,6-d...

With support from the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) and Environment Security Technology and Certification Program (ESTCP), SAIC has developed and demonstrated a marine unexploded ordnance (UXO) survey system designed for use in shallow water (<9.1m). The air foil shaped sensor platform has two actuatorcontrolled elevators to control depth, altitude and attitud...

Honeybees offer the potential of using free-flying organisms to search wide areas for the presence of explosives, unexploded ordnance (UXO), and landmines. The use of bees is analogous to dogs for mine clearance, except that a colony of tens of thousands of bees can be trained in about one hour to fly over and search a field for explosives, does not require a leash, and will not set off any min...

After a brief introduction to Humanitarian Demining we will review the basic principles of the electromagnetic detection of metallic objects, especially induction devices (“metal detectors”), and see how they are applied in Humanitarian Demining and Civil Engineering, with emphasis on visualization techniques. We will then report on tests of a commercial “imaging metal detector” aimed at trying...

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This paper presents the work of several ongoing studies to determine the effectiveness of multiple small robotic vehicles for performing mine field clearance, and the related problem of clearing unexploded ordnance from areas of interest. Many issues are implied in this opening sentence. Not the least of these is knowing, out the many items cluttering a battlefield, which ones need to be cleare...