Project description
A drone to clear minefields
Active landmines spread death and fear worldwide targeting mainly civilians, mostly women and children. It is estimated that 10 persons are killed every day by one of more than 100 million active mines found in more than 60 countries. Demining remains indispensable for the security of populations in belligerent or post-belligerent areas. However, existing methods based on manual technics or the employment of animals are costly, dangerous and slow limiting demining process efficacity. The EU-funded MKD project proposes a new system of landmine detection based on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The Mine Kafon Drone system is a safe, reliable, efficient, fast and cheap solution. It maps and scan entire areas to find the mines and then places a small detonator on every detected mine.
Objective
"There are more than 100 million active landmines throughout the world. These explosive devices not only kill 10 innocent civilians every day, but they breed fear and helplessness in the minds of millions of people around the world. Speaking about the landmine issue, Paul McCartney of The Beatles said: ""When a war is over I think it's a cowardly thing to leave the war behind you in minefields that hit women and children and the most vulnerable. Imagine the war is finished and you go to work and there are snipers shooting at you. Imagine taking your kids to the beach and you find that the beach is blowing up beneath you. Like there's nowhere safe.""
Using current technologies, detecting and clearing all landmines across the entire world would not be accomplished within our lifetime. These established processes, such as manual or animal-based discovery, are slow, dangerous and expensive. These drawbacks often mean that no demining efforts are even started in the first place.
Massoud and Mahmud Hassani, the founders of Mine Kafon, grew up on the edge of Kabul, in Afghanistan. They experienced the horrors of landmines from an early age. These experiences fueled the brothers to found Hassani Design BV and develop the Mine Kafon Drone (MKD) system. Using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the MKD offers a disruptive solution to landmine detection, providing a reliable and safe system that maps entire areas and scans them centimetre by centimere. Moreover, it does so faster, cheaper and more efficient than current technologies, without putting any human or animal life at risk.
The following proposal explores MKD's potential by examining its technical feasibility (problem-solution fit) and its commercial feasibility (product-market fit). With an increasing amount of money allocated for humanitarian demining, and with the drone market undergoing an exponential rise, the time to solve this long overdue problem is now. Help us make the world a safer, more hopeful place!"
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
6224BL MAASTRICHT
Netherlands
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.