Safer and Faster Humanitarian Demining with Robots

Introduction

Landmine Monitor reports that there are 984313 landmines in 678 km of Turkish borderline to be cleaned by the year 2014 where the estimated cost for cleaning these mines is around 1 billion US dollars.

Even without considering the cost issue of this very dangerous task, around 674 mines need to be cleaned every day in 4 years. Moreover, considering the fact that almost half of the year this region is under a blanket of snow, which makes it impossible to locate and deactivate the mines, it is impossible to achieve this cleaning task without robots.

Table 1 shows the size of the landmine problem where the number of of casualties caused by the landmines is listed (Landmine Monitor, 2011). It is important to remember that the social and economical effects are even harder to calculate.