New Smartphone App Helps Find Unexploded Land Mines

By Rebecca Boyle Posted 05.09.2011 at 2:44 pm 5 Comments

Land Mine Hunt Lahiru Jayatilaka helped develop a system that uses smartphones with metal detectors to seek out land mines. Justin Ide/Harvard University

De-miners on the hunt for unexploded land mines could get some help from a simple smartphone app that works with their metal detectors.

Students at Harvard University, working with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, designed a system called “pattern enhancement tool for assisting land mine sensing” (PETALS). It visualizes the outline of a buried land mine according to the metal detector’s feedback.

De-miners use a sweeping motion to cover the ground where a land mine might be buried. Their metal detectors beep as they move across the ground, and trained minesweepers can make out a mine’s shape and position underground according to the pattern of the beeps.

The PETALS system takes this a step further, drawing an outline of the mine’s shape in accordance with the pattern. The system shows one red dot for every beep of the metal detector, giving an increasingly detailed picture of what lies beneath.

It takes the minesweepers’ visualizations out of their heads and onto a map, according to a story published by the Harvard Gazette news service.

PETALS doesn’t require de-miners to change their tactics at all, and it’s a simple augmentation in areas with limited resources, where many land mines can still be found. It could even help train new minesweepers, according to the Gazette — in tests, newbies performed 80 percent better with the visualization than those who did not use it.

More than 110 million land mines of various types remain hidden around the world, according to UNICEF. Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia have suffered 85 percent of the world's land-mine casualties.

The PETALS system just requires a smartphone mounted to a metal detector, according to Lahiru Jayatilaka, a researcher at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

"Improving the de-miner rather than the equipment is a novel way to think about land mine removal technology," he said.

[Harvard Gazette]

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5 Comments

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Douglas_Von_Yamoto

05/09/11 at 8:19 pm

How wonderful is this.

An app for smartphones that is actually practical and useful.

Smartphones no longer just for dumb people.

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Army Juggernaut

05/10/11 at 10:35 am

I would not feel confident using this app. As a 12B who is trained to sweep for mines as part of my job I won't use anything less than an A/N PSS-14 mine detector. The ground penetrating radar mated with the metal detector is what makes the A/N PSS-14 effective beyond anything currently offered in our inventory.

However, this is a pretty cool in some ways. It's interesting that they can get a smart phone to communicate with a metal detector and create an "image" of a metal object it is detecting. Aof course the "image" is just the metalic halo but still. Kind of cool.

The A/N PSS-14 used to have a screen on it that would create an "image" of the mine but it was taken off because it was too distracting. It's more effective to train someone to hear and visualize with the system as it forces them to be more aware and pay more attention to detail. Which of course is paramount in a mine field.

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JohnStClair

05/12/11 at 10:09 pm

I was dressing to go out for dinner but I couldn't find my dress shoes. Using the pendulum to communicate with my spirit guide, I asked where the shoes were located. The pendulum pointed to the closet. After opening the closet, the shoes turned out to be those of my mother, not my shoes!

Because energy beings are totally logical, I asked where "my" shoes were located which I found under some newspapers that had fallen on top of them.

What this means is that human beings have the wherewithal to find landmines along the truck route or on a map of the location using pendulum triangulation. The researchers at MIT and Carnegie Mellon still don't understand what a human being is, even with all their AI research, and therefore limit us to using mechanical/electronic devices.

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Fuchsal

05/31/11 at 1:13 pm

This is really a sensefull app. Noone needs this millions of apps, which don`t have any more sense then to make fun.
But this app can save lifes. I wish they will create more of such useful apps.

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prime2011

06/24/11 at 9:17 am

They be better off making a homemade metal detector, MUCH cheaper and won't get you blown up.

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