59 signal processing – but detecting landmines remains an unsolved technical challenge, and I do believe it’s going to take quantum sensing and computing to tell safe land from unsafe land with 100% veracity.” As of writing, Dropla is using remote sensing technologies, deployed on a fleet of UAVs for wide-area surveying, in an initial “detection” phase of operations, which forms a map of landmine locations and depths, with UGVs then being used for a second, ground-based, “confirmation” phase. “Right now, our drones don’t communicate with each other or exchange position information. They each run their own separate mission, with only internal communications, purely to speed up data acquisition,” Shvaydak says. “Scanning 50 hectares with seven sensors and one UAV will take a week; do it with six drones and you’ll be finished in a day. And, today, at our live testing ground in Ukraine, co-developed with an engineering regiment of the Ukrainian Army, we’re clocking 30 hectares per day, reaching operational excellence to perform the real contracts for technical surveying in 2025.” He says the biggest effect of landmines stems not from their ordnance, but from the fear of encountering them: reports from international de-mining groups over the last 10 years estimate that just 2.5-5% of “suspected hazardous area [SHA]” will end up being actual “defined hazardous area [DHA]”, meaning dangerous land meriting direct technical intervention to remove landmines. Furthermore, conventional de-mining is pricey: clearing one hectare (worth about €400 ($417) of annual profit to a farmer) costs $10,000-30,000 and, per the above rate of landmine incidence, 95% of those costs are wasted clearing ground where no landmines are present. “So, you see the real systemic issue preventing worldwide de-mining: the ROI just isn’t there. Dropla’s first objective is to bring the price of de-mining down to 10 cents per square metre [$1030 per hectare] or lower; otherwise it’s really hard to make the financial case for de-mining,” Shvaydak says. “Having brought the cost down, we can then focus on optimising our tech and methods to ensure confident detections and confirmations. Today, we can free 90% of denied land extremely quickly before any actual major de-mining takes place. “Actual minesweepers weigh at least 600 kg and function alongside entire crews of trained sappers, so it’s important to note that what we do is not specifically the de-mining act, but doing area reduction. We take the amount of area to be physically de-mined down by 95%, and overall operational costs down by 90-97%. “Even though the land swept by our flailequipped UGV must be manually checked afterwards, the speed of the operation still increases by 80-200%. Safety skyrockets, as no human being will be able to physically trigger what hasn’t been triggered by a 600 kg flail hammering machine.” Dropla mine countermeasures | In operation Uncrewed Systems Technology | February/March 2025 A world without mines
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