A Clear Road Ahead- Developing a Combined Technological and Socio-Economic Approach to Freeing Affected Communities from Anti-Vehicle Landmines

Clearing landmines both saves and improves lives in numerous different ways. Demining can help a community access agricultural land, markets and food supply, schools, hospitals and other essential services, through the clearing of transportation links and routes. By clearing anti-personnel (AP) and anti-vehicle mines (AVMs) from roads and fields, people and communities are reconnected, and this can bring huge socio-economic benefits to developing countries where these are most needed. Clearing AVMs from roads can also be a prerequisite for other aid agencies and government services to access remote communities. It restores freedom of movement and fosters freedom from fear. However, efforts to clear roads and fields from the threat of landmines are complicated by two issues: 1) the slow speed of current demining approaches particularly for certain classes of landmine; and 2) the need to prioritise the order in which different areas and land types are cleared for maximum benefit in the shortest possible timeframe.

We propose a project to tackle both of these issues, creating a new technological tool for detecting landmines alongside a methodology for examining cultural, political, and socio-economic factors at the national, district, and even community levels. This approach can guarantee the deployment of the technology for the greatest possible benefit in the shortest possible time. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that a combined strategy of this kind has been attempted. The particular target of the project is minimum-metal AVMs laid in roads and fields, which is a class of landmines that is very difficult to detect by other methods, and thus very slow and costly to clear. Beyond this synergistic approach, the project will benefit from the unique advantages of our proposed technology for the clearance of AVMs. This is because our sensor relies on a frequency-sensitive detection of the explosive material, which is contained in large quantities in anti-vehicle mines.

The sensor's underlying technology is based on a quadrupole resonance (QR) approach, which relies on a simple detection mechanism: a pulse or series of radiofrequency (RF) pulses is applied at a particular frequency for the explosives of interest, and the presence (or absence) of a return signal is sought. As with metal detectors, a specially-designed planar RF antenna is placed close to ground level and fed with a sequence of RF pulses at or close to the QR frequency of the explosive to be detected. The same antenna is then used to detect the weak signals emitted by the explosive following the excitation. The important difference from metal detection is that it is the actual explosive contained within the mine that is detected and not any feature of the mine (such as the casing or the trigger), so the false alarm rate is low. This is particularly important for humanitarian demining, which aims to clear most, if not all, of the landmines in the interrogated terrain.

According to the Landmine Monitor, 58 countries are still landmine-affected as of November 2015, including some of the poorest countries in the world. Landmines restrict access to farming land, water sources and routes to market, and they inevitably slow-up regeneration projects. For example, a 2004 report by the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining calculated that over 4 million kilograms of agricultural production is lost annually in Eritrea due to landmines. Another example is Angola, one of the most heavily-mined countries on earth, where entire towns with populations of over 20,000, are essentially isolated from the rest of the country due to the presence of AVMs in the routes in and out of the area.

Moreover, the speed at which countries recover from conflict is greatly impacted by the continued presence of landmines,; as the threat they pose prevent people accessing food production areas and markets, delay significantly greatly retard the return of displaced populations to their homes, and obstruct the rebuilding of national infrastructure . This is on top of the thousands of casualties they cause. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first project worldwide focusing on a technology coupled with a demining strategy tailored particularly for clearing AVMs. Therefore, delivering our proposed vision could solve a crucial problem in mine-affected countries, and thus have huge impact on humanitarian demining.

The approach taken will be multi-disciplinary, combining the efforts of technologists, experts in international development and economics, and experienced demining staff working in the targeted countries. The project's academic contribution is a joint effort by King's College London's Faculty of Natural and Mathematical Sciences and the School of Global Affairs, which will work closely with economics experts in London Business School in order to combine qualitative and quantitative analysis of the impact of clearing AVMs with our technology, not only on the countries targeted in course of the project but also in future demining operations. To make the research relevant to mine-affected communities, the project investigators will work closely with the HALO Trust, which is the largest humanitarian mine-clearance organisation in the world.

This will ensure that the research is known to a wider community including engineering, social sciences, economics, and the demining community. Impact will also be delivered by the project's strategy to adopt an open-source approach to hardware development, in order to keep down costs of the final system and to promote a wide-scale utilisation of the technology unfettered by IP considerations. The anticipated business model will permit SMEs in countries directly-affected by landmines to take on the manufacture and selling of systems themselves, and allow demining NGOs to contract such services to local partners as part of their engagement and investment in affected communities.