Dartmouth Engineering Researchers Present Novel System to Help Clear Landmines

"The summit was focused on connecting researchers with groups in Ukraine working to demine the land," said engineering PhD Innovation Program Fellow Max Orman-Kollmar who delivered the presentation. "It was a great opportunity not only to speak with people who have decades of demining experience, but also to expose them to new technologies and applications."

"The mission of my Electromagnetic Sensing Group has been to save lives and protect the environment," said Professor of Engineering Fridon Shubitidze, the group's principal investigator and Orman-Kollmar's faculty advisor. "Over the past twenty-five years, we've been committed to developing, building, and demonstrating advanced electromagnetic sensing technologies—both software and hardware—for detecting, locating, and classifying buried unexploded ordnance [UXO] and landmines."

Professor Shubitidze continued, "Recently, we completed an autonomous ultra-light electromagnetic array system for sea, air, and land [ULEMA-SEAL]. This system, combined with our sensor technology called high-frequency electromagnetic induction [HFEMI]—developed over the past decade under US Army and ONR programs—could significantly expedite UXO and landmine clearance efforts around the world."

At the summit, Orman-Kollmar was able to learn more about the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and all the issues surrounding the landmine problem. "One of the biggest challenges is a lack of trust in new technologies," he said. "So they brought us together to connect with people who work heavily in the field."

In particular, he connected with two people involved in global demining efforts with the British Army for 30 years. "When I talked about our system, they were honestly blown away. They didn't even know it was possible to find UXO this way and be able to determine the GPS coordinates as well as the depth and orientation. They were shocked. They said, 'If you can make this commercially available in the next ten years, it'll speed everything up!'"

He also learned that Ukrainians may need extra time to learn the system and actually test it and see it work. Added Orman-Kollmar, "A representative from the UN at the summit invited us to do some field testing in Western Ukraine."

One of the keys to persuading people to use their technology is the huge advantage of having an autonomous device, where if something goes wrong, nobody gets hurt. Shubitidze's group is working on making their system even lighter and more efficient for deployment on both drones and small wheeled robots.

"You program it where to go at a certain speed and path pattern and then have someone on a laptop sitting in an air-conditioned room watching the screen," said Shubitidze. Each delivery method has its pros and cons. The sensors work best when they're close to the ground, but drones can have better access to certain areas.

Twenty-five years ago, when Shubitidze first started as a researcher with Adjunct Professor Kevin O'Neill, they focused on the problem of buried metallic UXO at former US military ranges.

"That's still a big problem in the US," he explained. "We validated our land-based signal processing and sensor technology at more than twenty live UXO sites. Then the Army came to us and said, 'Okay, you do well with metallic target detection and identification. But what if those targets are made with composite materials such as carbon fiber?'"

So in collaboration with the US Army's nearby Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab (CRREL), Shubitidze began developing high-frequency electromagnetic induction technology designed to find non-metallic targets. Then, in 2016, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) decided to dedicate ongoing funding to the project.

Shubitidze had only been working on the data processing side of things until the COVID pandemic hit. "That's when we started building the hardware system ourselves," he said. "That was a side-effect of COVID—just sitting at home so you go in the basement and build stuff. That's when we came up with the ULEMA system that's so lightweight it can be deployed on drones, handheld devices, and autonomous robots."

The group recently received a $1.5 million contract with CRREL to continue working on refinements. "Along with Max, I now have three PhD students from CRREL working on this, as well as Adjunct Professor Ben Barrowes," remarked Shubitidze who is also exploring ways to collaborate with robotics expert Professor Laura Ray. In addition, he said the Navy has expressed interest in integrating their system with an underwater robot. "There's a new computer science professor here who does underwater robots so we may want to team up with them too."