Yep! That’s a pic of me! 
Only stitches I’ve ever gotten in my life. That story was particularly funny because absolutely NOTHING happened for the first couple of days except pulling over Dutch trailers. Then, literally, in our last hour there, we had a chase, a dramatic car accident, and me losing my balance on the metal highway divider and ending up with a metal lens hood cutting open my eyebrow.
Which one’s your friend’s dad? Jerry Bromenshenk is part of this project; he works here at the University of Montana.
Heh. It could have been worse, you could have been covering the cross country trip in the propane powered Volvo wagon that they tried (the article included a hysterical photo of the reporters fighting over which one of them got to shoot the car with a pistol), and ended up abandoning because they couldn’t find the promised propane (and propane accessories) that they were promised.
Well, you see, the mine body is insensitive, only the mine fuse makes it go ‘boom.’ So you take a plastic rod and insert it in the ground down to about 30cm at an angle so that you hit the mine body, not the fuse.
Then the clearer exposes enough of the thing to make sure it is vaguely sinister (not a rock or something). He marks it and calls in a second guy who blows the mine in place (if possible) or lifts it (if need be).
As for robots, well we are at cost/benefit again. How many million-dollar robots can you afford to lift ten dollar mines? Remote detection will work, but it is simply too expensive for use in whatever hot, humid country we are talking about.
Sorry for continuing the hijack, but thanks. Zoltan Scrivener is a very talented writer, and Johannesburg was one of the craziest places I’ve been—in both good and bad ways.
Is he the one working on the LIDAR system for tracking the bees? He gave a colloquium here (Montana State) last semester.
Apparently, the bees are very cheap and easy to train, and the equipment to track the bees isn’t too bad, either.
The basis for biological detection of mines is that all militarily important (get out of here mercury fulminate) is carbon based. Of course biological systems are ideal for detecting organic chemicals.
Just to recap what others have said (and since this is one of the things I’ve helped do here in Sri Lanka that I’m actually proud of), mechanical clearance isn’t always suited for the clearance task. We find a lot of mined areas here on uneven terrain around schools, footpaths, and wells, and a lot of folks are subsistence farmers, so brushcutting and flails aren’t an option.
What the State Department did here was to work with the Sri Lanka Army to train humanitarian manual deminers and equip them, then add in mine detecting dogs, then look at mechanical clearance options. There’s also some local engineers working on remote sensors based on biological models like rats, dogs and bees that could be deployed on small RC vehicles, like Mindstorms or such.
Pictures of the first cadre graduation, including some of a demonstration of manual demining:
http://www.army.lk/Image_Gallery_%20firstdemineteam.htm
Pictures of a delegation vist when the donors got to meet their dogs and see them work:
http://www.army.lk/News_Reports/2004/June/151.htm
The LIDAR stuff is specifically MSU. Bromenshenk was the guy who showed that it was possible to train bees to recognize certain chemicals (like the ones given off by land mines). I think that what’s going to happen is that Bromenshenk has a private company that’s going to connect the two research areas to build a workable system for the mapping of minefields using bees and LIDAR.
No luck, Phillip Rodacy is my friends dad. I used to live in Albuquerque before moving to Vegas.