Mine Detector

Dogs.

It's actually a trivial problem. You simply round up a group of prisoners from whatever third world country you're invading, march them accross the minefield in question and plot the detonations.

Jeesh! What are they teaching in these schools today?

Bob

What if you are looking for anti-tank or magnetic-influence mines?

ROFLOL.

Dogs have been done. The new idea is to use rats. The "pouch rat" can be trained to signal where the mines are. They are too small and light to be much risk of touching one off.

In the wild, they bury food caches and relocated them by smell. They are trained by putting peanuts on example mines for a while. Soon the rat will learn that mines mean peanuts. After that, you don't put the peanut on the mine but instead feed them a peanut every time they correctly signal the mines location. This leads to the other major advantage of the pouch rat. Pouch rats work for peanuts.

On the metal detector front, look up the patents of Bruce Candy.

GPR doesn't work very well.

Animals can smell them.

They make temperature differences.

Chasing a bunch of sheep back and forth over the field works too. You eat the ones that "retire".

Detecting the mines magnetically kind of works but you are up to a cost of about $15K US before you get into anything reasonable.

DARPA funded a project to try to apply SQUIDs to the problem of UXO and mines. I don't think there was much of a result and it was really just an extemely high end metal detector.

Some effort has been put into using sound but I don't think there was much that worked. Try googling on "lawerence livermore labs" and various words and you may find it. IIRC it was them that were involved.

out-source it to india or mexico. ?

Have you tried the other side of google?

Good Luck! Rich

First off, you could try inventing a keyboard with shift key. If it's got an apostrophe key and a spacebar, even better!

As for mine detectors, I think they are usually quite advanced devices. Somehow I feel people may be a little reluctant to use hobby or beginner projects for detecting mines. But if you *do* manage to come up with a good idea for a cheap and reliable detector, it would be a popular device.

Current techniques include x-ray systems and acoustic devices, as well as traditional methods like a pointy stick.

Actually you're supposed to be the detector. Any serious project would be done by a senior engineer to minimize the risk of having "forgotten" something. When you "forget" something, - BOOM -, and you're in the wheel chair or just distributed pieces.

Rene

How about Cracker Jacks (one keeps the prize)?

Is there a good ROI on the distribution?

Use robots ?

That is the purpose of personell mines. Distribte your parts for a few cents. And in that respect the ROI is good. Except those that don't explode and cost a fortune for removal.

Rene

Flail tanks

Neutron activation analysis? Terahertz imaging?

Sure. But the robots have to work under all conditions. What do you do when your prototype got stuck for some reason ? Get it yourself ? Send the junior engineer into the field to get it ?

Rene

In article , Dirk Bruere at Neopax wrote: [..mine detection ..]

If the soil is wet or clay, this won't work. GPR only works in dry sand and that generally is a GHz imaging not Terahertz.

If you went higher and used gamma rays, you may be able to detect them while you kill everything nearby.

In article , martin griffith wrote: [... mines ...]

You'd run out of PHBs before you run out of mines.

The PHB is likely to be an elderly white american in this case.