Not Only for Killing: Drones Are Now Detecting Land Mines in Ukraine

With a stiff gait, a drone dog stomped up and down a makeshift minefield at a U.S. Army testing center in Virginia, shuddering when it neared a plate-size puck meant to simulate an anti-tank explosive. On its back was a stack of cameras, GPS devices, radios and thermal imaging technology that military developers hope will help it detect mines at close range, sparing humans from that dangerous task.

For the most part, the dog appeared to know when to stay away from the mock mine, given the artificial intelligence embedded in its system to identify threats. “Mostly it does, but sometimes it doesn’t,” Kendall V. Johnson, a physicist at the countermine division of the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, said during a demonstration this summer outside Washington. “That’s something we’re working on currently.”

The drone dog is among a handful of emerging technologies in anti-mine warfare — a field that, until now, experts say had not changed much in the past 50 years. But just as drones, which are generally defined as uncrewed machines, not exclusively aircraft, that are piloted remotely, have proved in Ukraine to be an important offensive weapon in modern fighting, they now may also provide defense, with new and safer ways to detect and clear land mines.

“There’s a bit of poetic justice in this,” said Colin King, a career military and humanitarian weapons specialist who co-founded the England-based firm Fenix Insight to help detect and destroy ordnance. “Drones have been such a force for destruction in this war, and I rather like the symmetry of the potential for drones to offer part of the solution.”

As in so many areas now, artificial intelligence is driving the progress. Fenix, for example, has developed software enabling drones to not only spot and identify types of land mines, but also predict where they might lie. It does that by drawing on open-source intelligence and social media reports from conflicts around the world where military units have laid mines or where rockets have delivered scatterable munitions.