Drones Find Dozens of Landmines Littering Ukraine So They Can Be Defused

Ghoti Ichthus · Jun 15, 2024

Drones Find Dozens of Landmines Littering Ukraine So They Can Be Defused

By Andy Corbley
May 2, 2024

When drones appeared on the scene en masse, many people saw the potential immediately—for military purposes, for breathtaking photography, even wildlife conservation, but for one small group of technicians, the AI-armed eye in the sky had another obvious purpose: saving people around the world from being killed by landmines and unexploded ordnance.
The group, called Safe Pro AI, pilots drones carrying patented advanced computer vision software technologies that sweeps the ground for landmines.
Recently, the team from Safe Pro was invited by the UN and Armed Forces of Ukraine to conduct training exercises in a field north of Kyiv. UN workers had scattered between 50 and 100 inert landmines and bombs in the field and told Jasper Baur and his colleagues to get to work.
Using flight planning software, Jasper and the co-founder on the project, Gabriel Steinberg pulled an all-nighter coding for the detection of all the mines in the more than 15,000 pictures the drones captured. It took 2 hours for the deep-learning algorithm to make it’s determinations from the photographs, in which it correctly located 72 of the hazards."

“[t]he UN deemed our results impressive enough to invite us back for a second round of demonstrations,” Baur writes in the most recent issue of Spectrum IEEE. “All our hard work paid off. Today, our technology is being used by several humanitarian nonprofits detecting land mines in Ukraine, including the Norwegian People’s Aid and the HALO Trust, which is the world’s largest nonprofit dedicated to clearing explosives left behind after wars.”

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