Using Multi-Modal Sensing to Reduce Cost, Risk, and Error in Landmine Detection

Landmines are a tragic remnant of war that the threaten economic security, mobility, and lives of people around the world. Though there has been a plethora of research in landmine sensing in the last few decades, most methods are expensive, energy-intensive, and result in a high number of false positives. ClearField Robotics aims to improve outcomes in the field by reducing the time and cost of land surveying.

By incorporating multi-modal sensing systems, we can reduce the need for singular, highly sensitive, and expensive equipment with sensor fusion. The goal of ClearField Robotics is to develop a low cost, user-friendly, and adoptable method of landmine detection without sacrificing accuracy. We combine a traditional metal detector (for broad sweeping) and an automated probing mechanism (to classify the shape of any detected metal objects) to reduce the number of false positives, increase demining speed, reduce demining costs.