Humanitarian demining is a pre-requisite to economic revival of many countries like Sri Lanka, Angola, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mozambique, Egypt, Croatia, etc. However, it is widely accepted that humanitarian demining is a slow process sometimes extending beyond one or two decades after the conflict is over. The primary reason for this is the simple fact that there has not been enough donations or investments directed to develop appropriate technologies to improve the efficiency of demining. Therefore, still today, we use techniques such as raking, metal detection, etc., that have not seen much improvement after World War—II.

 

We have identified two main critical problems that significantly impede faster progress of humanitarian demining.

 

1. Still today we send a human to the minefield to detect and remove mines. This causes the area coverage very slow due to the massive risk involved. Therefore, we aim at developing robotic platforms that can carry sensors in a rough, vegetated environment.

2. None of the sensors we have today can detect a signal gradient leading to a landmine. For example, a metal detector should come virtually on top of the mine to give an alarm. Therefore, we are using trained rodents with extremely powerful Olfactory capacity (> 1000 times human nose), whose weight falls bellow the critical threshold needed to trigger a mine (< 7kg per contact point). In our method, the human expert uses a semi-autonomous field robot to guide the rodent to sniff for odor gradients leading to landmines.

 

The experiments done so far in Sri Lanka in collaboration with the University of Moratuwa, the most prominent university for engineering in Sri Lanka, has been very promising. We expect your generous support in terms of donations to expand a Harvard initiative to carry out multi-disciplinary research to push the frontiers of state of the art available for humanitarian demining.

 

If you wish to make a donation, please contact: Harvard Humanitarian Initiative

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Thrishantha Nanayakkara, PhD

Visiting Scholar

School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Harvard University

Room 238, Maxwell Dworkin

33 Oxford Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

USA

 

 

Tel: 617-460-2256

Email: thrish@seas.harvard.edu