Pointing at things makes them much more important
Hello everyone, we are the Mine Sweepers (formerly the Corn Dogs), and we’d like to take this as an opportunity to introduce our unique project and the bizarre journey we somewhat unknowingly have embarked upon.
The first few weeks of this Fall semester have been a whirlwind, which is pretty common place for JMU, but this year it’s been for a very different reason. We as a group are lucky enough to be participating in one of the largest inter-disciplinary courses that JMU has ever offered, and even better, the course is all about flying drones. As amazing as it would be to take a class where you strictly fly drones around for three days every week, this is not the reality; school is school and something beneficial has to come from class.
Our group’s goal is simple: we want to detect landmines. Using GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) technology attached to the head of our drone, it is our hope that we will be able to detect landmines so that our partner group, the landmine disarming group, can get rid of them.
As you may have seen on the news, millions of refugees have been escaping from the horrible situation that is currently occurring in war-torn Syria. The routes that many of these refugees have been taking to leave Syria are riddled with landmines, and the detection techniques currently in place are either dangerous and ineffective, or extremely expensive. It is our goal to fly the drone along these same routes, detect the landmines that infest the area and disarm them, creating a safer journey for a resilient group of people who have seen more violence than any humans should.
Common land mind detection techniques
The process so far has been great. We’re in direct communication with MALA GeoScience, the premier GPR technology manufacturer in the world, who have agreed to let us use one of their $6,000 dollar GPR’s for our project. We’ve had a sit down meeting Dr. Ken Rutherford who has won a Nobel Peace Prize for his life-long dedication to the eradication of landmines all over the world, and who knows more about landmines than we will know about any one topic in our lifetime. And last but not least, we’ve developed an addiction to Hersey Kisses which serve as our dog-treat-equivalent incentive for doing good work.
We can’t begin to explain how excited we are to be part of such an exceptional and challenging project and we urge you guys to join us on this journey as we post updates throughout the semester of our progress. If you see a robot flying above you in the sky, or potentially crashing into the ground next to you and bursting into flames, don’t be alarmed: it’s for a good cause.
I swear Hope is in our group too she just takes all the pictures
Authors: Hope Ucciardi & Patrick Murphy