ReliefWeb

Following a two-year feasibility study, The Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) last year moved its unmanned aircraft system (UAS) program into its operational testing phase, working with The HALO Trust and MAG in Angola to analyse the real-world benefits that unmanned aerial systems (UAS) can bring to demining activities.

The GICHD (www.gichd.org), based in Geneva, Switzerland, is an expert organisation working to reduce the impact of mines, cluster munitions and other explosive hazards, in close partnership with mine action and other human security organisations (read its 2015 Annual Report).
From 2012 to 2014 the GICHD ran a wide-ranging UAS feasibility study, based on the use of senseFly’s swinglet CAM mapping drone. This project involved flight tests in Sweden, Germany,
Switzerland, Azerbaijan and Iraqi Kurdistan, the aim being to explore the potential benefits and challenges of using fixed-wing ‘mini UAS’ in mine action operations, as well as to promote the civilian use of these technologies

“Most actors in the field of humanitarian demining today employ publicly available satellite data, like Google Earth, or old topographic maps of the areas in which they operate,” says Inna Cruz, an Information Management Advisor at GICHD and the organisation’s UAS project leader. “This assists mine action organisations over large areas, for example when observing a group of scattered minefields or a mined border. However satellite data can be quite low resolution, compared to UAS outputs.”

The first results of the GICHD’s feasibility study found that small, light mapping drone technology could become a valuable supplementary tool for mine action teams that require accurate, up-to-date imagery of suspected and confirmed hazardous sites.

The GICHD mapped the benefits and challenges of using UAS for mine action operations via several online surveys that its team conducted between 2012 and 2014. “The purpose of these surveys was to identify user needs and explore the potential use of UAS in humanitarian mine action,” Cruz explains. “The 42 respondents comprised representatives of international mine action organisations and nongovernmental organisations, predominantly consisting of information-management and operations staff with combined work experience that spans more than 20 mine-affected countries.”

“We saw from our feasibility study that images acquired with such an UAS can be used to enhance planning, recording and reporting capabilities at the different stages of the Land Release process, namely non-technical survey (NTS), technical survey (TS), and clearance,” Cruz explains