Every 28 minutes, someone steps on a landmine. One third of these affected people are either women or children. Fewer than 10% of landmine victims have access to proper medical care and rehabilitation services (“2013 Global LM Crisis”). Landmines are a huge problem.
“Liquina Gimo Kariche, 65, lost her right leg above the knee to an anti-personnel landmine in 1987, three years after her husband was killed by an anti-personnel landmine.” Retrieved from ICRC.
There are currently over 100 million landmines buried worldwide. Because we discovered many methods to detect landmines and very little information on the disarming of landmines, we agreed that taking the disarming route would provide us with the opportunity to get creative! In the following 16 weeks, our goal is to create a cost-effective and efficient system using drones to disable landmines in Syria.
We will collaborate with humanitarian aid worker and landmine survivor, Dr. Kenneth R. Rutherford, as well as with the other landmine team, who will be focusing on the detection of landmines. Their team would be responsible for detecting and marking the location of the landmine. From there, we would disarm the landmine. To center our research, we decided to focus primarily on IED (improvised explosive device) mines in Syria. Since the other group is detecting the landmine, we are entering the field under the assumption that the landmine has been marked and we know the exact location. Our responsibility is to then come in with a system to eliminate of the threat.
We have discovered there are many obstacles with detecting and disarming landmines. Just a few include: detecting false positives, cost of equipment, surrounding violence, community safety, battery life of drones, efficiency, and working conditions. But we are up for the challenge! According to Dr. Kenneth Rutherford, Syria is a prime location choice because it is one of five main countries since 2014 that use cluster bombs which are essentially aerial division bombs that are released in the air. However, 30% of these submunitions fail to detonate when they hit the ground and remain active.
Our original idea was to create a two-chemical system that would solidify the ground around the landmine. Upon further research, this method seems to require extensive labor and has not been entirely successful in testing. We are still brainstorming, and each of us has decided to conduct further research on specific topics.
Pictured (from left to right): Premal Patel (Physics), Urvi Patel (Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication), Everett Pitts (Industrial Design), Alexa Senio (Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication), and Jeff Small (Physics).
By Premal Patel, Urvi Patel, Everett Pitts, Alexa Senio, and Jeffrey Small