When drones first became widely available, their potential applications were immediately evident: military operations, stunning aerial photography, and even wildlife conservation.
However, for a niche group of technician, drones equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) offered a revolutionary solution to a critical global issue: the detection and removal of landmines and unexploded ordnance. This group, known as Safe Pro AI, has developed drones armed with advanced computer vision software capable of identifying dangerous explosives from the sky.
Safe Pro AI’s mission is to save lives by detecting landmines and unexploded ordnance, which pose significant threats in over 50 countries and regions. Their work recently brought them to Ukraine, where the UN and Armed Forces of Ukraine invited them to participate in a training exercise.
This exercise took place in a field north of Kyiv, where between 50 and 100 inert landmines and bombs were strategically placed. Jasper Baur, one of the key figures in Safe Pro AI, and his team were tasked with detecting these hazards using their drone technology.
The Safe Pro AI team utilized flight planning software to conduct their mission. Baur, along with co-founder Gabriel Steinberg, spent an entire night coding a deep-learning algorithm designed to analyze the over 15,000 photographs taken by the drones. Within two hours, the algorithm successfully identified 72 of the planted hazards, demonstrating the efficacy and potential of their technology.
Baur writes in the most recent issue of Spectrum IEEE, “[t]he UN deemed our results impressive enough to invite us back for a second round of demonstrations. 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.”
The implications of this technology are vast. Landmines and unexploded ordnance continue to contaminate areas from active conflict zones like Afghanistan and Ukraine to regions affected by historical conflicts such as the Falklands War and Laos.
In 2020 alone, efforts to clear contaminated land resulted in the removal of more than 135,000 antipersonnel mines from 146 square kilometers of land. Despite these efforts, thousands of people are killed or injured each year by these devices, which are now illegal under a UN treaty signed by over 167 countries. However, the use of landmines persists, with countries like Russia, Ukraine, and even the United States (which recently supplied cluster bombs to Ukraine) continuing the practice.
Given the gaps in international law enforcement, organizations like Safe Pro AI are crucial. They play a vital role in preventing casualties, particularly among children and rural populations who are most at risk. In Ukraine alone, an area equivalent to the size of Florida is now mined, and it requires approximately 60,000 drone photographs to cover a single square kilometer. Each photograph takes about three minutes for a human to inspect, highlighting the need for automated solutions like those developed by Safe Pro AI.
“At that rate, it would take more than 500 million person-hours to manually search imagery covering all of Ukraine’s suspected contaminated land,” Baur writes.
The origins of Safe Pro AI trace back to 2019, when Jasper Baur and his colleagues at Binghamton University’s Geophysics and Remote Sensing Laboratory trained an AI system to detect a specific type of Soviet landmine known as the “butterfly mine.”
In 2020, Baur and Steinberg founded the Demining Research Community, aiming to tackle the global landmine issue using robotics, geophysics, and remote sensing.
In their ongoing quest to enhance their demining capabilities, the Demining Research Community has experimented with integrating aerial magnetometry, thermal imaging, and LiDAR into their drones. These technologies provide additional context for visual images, improving the AI’s ability to accurately identify hazards.
Safe Pro AI’s innovative approach represents a significant advancement in the fight against landmines and unexploded ordnance. By leveraging AI and drone technology, they are not only making the world safer but also paving the way for future technological solutions to global challenges. As their work continues to evolve, the hope is that more regions can be cleared of these deadly remnants, saving countless lives and allowing communities to rebuild safely.
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