CORDIS Archive

	ESPRIT Humanitarian Demining
	Support Activities to R&D Projects

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Rationale | Networking R&D Efforts | Test and evaluation | Anti-Personnel Landmine Signatures

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Rationale

Several ESPRIT R&D projects are now working on humanitarian demining equipment, and a number of other projects on this topic are running in Europe at national level and in the EUREKA framework. The support activities described here aim at increasing the efficiency of these actions through the organisation of common tasks.

The European Commission's JRC in Ispra, as the focal point of the Commission's own R&D efforts in support of humanitarian demining, plays a central role in the efforts described in this document.

Networking R&D Efforts

The aim of the actions is to improve awareness, communication and collaboration among various R&D projects on humanitarian demining running in the EU.

The

29381 ARIS Network of excellence aims at fostering exchanges among projects in humanitarian demining conducted at EU level and at national level.

The

501853 EUDEM study performs a survey of the State of the Art in the EU related to humanitarian demining technology, products and practice.

Test and Evaluation

The aim of these actions is to provide access to independent test facilities for the evaluation, assessment, verification, validation and benchmarking of systems and equipment developed by ESPRIT projects and other actors. This also includes the provision of appropriate test objects to qualify the performance of mine detection equipment.

501031 MINETEST provides access to independent test facilities for ESPRIT R&D projects related to humanitarian demining

501854 SEARCH2 will perform evaluation of new equipment or fieldable prototypes for humanitarian demining

501852 MIMEVA will study and compare different ways to simulate landmines for research, training and development needs in humanitarian demining.

Anti-Personnel Landmine Signatures

The aim of the actions below is to respond to the need from all R&D projects of landmine signature data to train and test multisensor processing algorithms. It is envisaged to perform some measurement campaigns centrally and to foster exchange of existing data sets.

501032 MINESIGN performs measurements on the characteristics of landmines, potential "false alarms" and background, and will develop and make available a library of landmine signatures.

29479 MACADAM conducts registered multi-sensor data acquisition with existing commercial sensors on a set of landmines. The data will be made available to ESPRIT humanitarian demining R&D projects.

501851 SIGEX aims at improving the exploitation of anti-personnel landmine (APL) signatures for R&D in humanitarian demining.

Note: Some of the activities described in this document are accompanying measures funded under the ESPRIT programme. Others are contracts resulting from calls for tender issued under the "Scientific and technical support activities to community policies suited to a competitive approach" (budget line B6-792).

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