With a stiff gait, a drone dog stomped up and down a makeshift minefield at a U.S. Army testing center in Virginia, shuddering when it neared a plate-size puck meant to simulate an anti-tank explosive. On its back was a stack of cameras, GPS devices, radios and thermal imaging technology that military developers hope will help it detect mines at close range, sparing humans from that dangerous task.
For the most part, the dog appeared to know when to stay away from the mock mine, given the artificial intelligence embedded in its system to identify threats. “Mostly it does, but sometimes it doesn’t,” Kendall V. Johnson, a physicist at the countermine division of the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, said during a demonstration this summer outside Washington. “That’s something we’re working on currently.”
The drone dog is among a handful of emerging technologies in anti-mine warfare — a field that, until now, experts say had not changed much in the past 50 years. But just as drones, which are generally defined as uncrewed machines, not exclusively aircraft, that are piloted remotely, have proved in Ukraine to be an important offensive weapon in modern fighting, they now may also provide defense, with new and safer ways to detect and clear land mines.
“There’s a bit of poetic justice in this,” said Colin King, a career military and humanitarian weapons specialist who co-founded the England-based firm Fenix Insight to help detect and destroy ordnance. “Drones have been such a force for destruction in this war, and I rather like the symmetry of the potential for drones to offer part of the solution.”
As in so many areas now, artificial intelligence is driving the progress. Fenix, for example, has developed software enabling drones to not only spot and identify types of land mines, but also predict where they might lie. It does that by drawing on open-source intelligence and social media reports from conflicts around the world where military units have laid mines or where rockets have delivered scatterable munitions.
In January, Mr. King paired the software with an uncrewed aircraft from another British company, Ace High Drone Specialists, and tested it with Ukrainian forces in Kherson, where it found multiple Russian-designed TM-62 anti-tank land mines half-buried in grass and dirt.
After more than 10 years of war, Ukraine is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. Experts estimate that about one-third of its territory needs to be demined — a daunting and deadly mission any time, but especially in wartime. Countless tons of unexploded ordnance, from both Russian and Ukrainian troops, are being added to in daily shelling, some of which includes cluster munitions that can sit unexploded on the ground for years, endangering civilians.
Land mines slowed Ukraine’s attempts last summer to push Russia out of its eastern Donbas region, as well as stunted Russia’s counter-thrust this summer. Russian forces frequently seek to trap the Ukrainians by firing mine-carrying missiles behind the front lines, cutting off supply and retreat routes. That is where a drone empowered with A.I. can quickly help pick out a route by finding the mines to avoid.
“Knowing where the hell things are is a huge problem,” Mr. King said. “Locating them is critical to delineating the danger areas and initiating clearance.”
Already, the Ukrainians have been testing mine-seeking drones equipped with infrared cameras, magnetometers and neural network analysis — a type of A.I. — since last year. Some of those tests have yielded a 70 percent success rate in detecting mines, said Yulia Svyrydenko, Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister.
Ukraine is also developing a system with the American data analytics company Palantir that will use A.I. to study socioeconomic and environmental conditions across the country that Ms. Svyrydenko said would “determine which of the war-affected lands should be demined first.”
In written responses this month to emailed questions, Ms. Svyrydenko said Ukraine was depending both on its emerging domestic industry and on international allies to obtain mine-clearing machines and equipment.
Allies are contributing to a $110 million fund for technical assistance and training for military transport units, emergency services and the country’s National Guard, and at least 92 demining machines are currently clearing land on humanitarian missions across Ukraine.
A coalition of NATO states has also pledged to provide Ukraine with demining equipment, funds to procure it and training for it as part of the alliance’s focus on some of the war’s most pressing needs. And the European Union said this month it would fund a $2.2 million grant to provide 16 Belgian Malinois ordnance-sniffing dogs to new mine-disposal teams, made up of eight Ukrainian women.
“And even then, what we have is not enough,” Ms. Svyrydenko said. “No one has faced such a challenge since the Second World War. Neither Ukraine nor its partners were ready for such a challenge. Now, by working together, we are changing global approaches to demining.”
Since February 2022, when Russia began its full-scale invasion, Ukraine has surveyed about 13,500 square miles of its territory — roughly the size of the country of Moldova — and has cleared mines from about 1,800 square miles.
One ray of light is that many of the mines in Ukraine are scattered on the ground, instead of buried, “so it is possible to actually see them visually,” said Jennifer Hyman, a spokeswoman for the HALO Trust, a humanitarian organization that is sharing its drone imagery with technical experts at Amazon Web Services to develop software that finds mines.
Finding mines is still an agonizingly slow process, taking an analyst at least two days of poring over pictures and video collected by HALO drones of any of the 288 minefields in Ukraine that the humanitarian group has documented.
But when the new A.I.-enhanced software is ready, “that timeline can be cut down to maybe half an hour,” said Matthew Abercrombie, a HALO research and development officer. “So we can really start to churn through this imagery, produce this evidence and get it back into the hands of people who are making the decisions about where we should clear and where we shouldn’t.”
The HALO Trust also works with the State Department, which has spent nearly $210 million on demining efforts in Ukraine since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and helped separatists seize land in the Donbas region. Over the past two years, efforts to equip Ukraine with everything from thermal detectors to magnetometers to hyperspectral imaging cameras have picked up speed.
Some of that work is being done at the U.S. Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, at Fort Belvoir, Va., on equipment destined for both military and humanitarian missions. Engineers there have developed their own version of the mine-detection software that relies on drone imaging. They are also working on a hand-held scanner that can show soldiers the shape of a buried mine, based on what the mine detector picks up, and then feed it back to a database to create a map of where the explosives are located.
Then there is Mr. Johnson’s drone dog, equipped with night-vision sensors in its “eyes” that earned it the nickname Anthrax because “he’s very scary” in the dark, he said. Several months ago, a group of young Army soldiers test-drove Anthrax through mine-detection scenarios, Mr. Johnson said, and they became “a big fan of this guy — especially when we were climbing more on the wooded side, going around trees” on its four legs.
By contrast, older models of mine detection robots lacked the technology packed into Anthrax — particularly the A.I. software — and were clunky, sporting only a single camera and moving on tracks or wheels that largely confined them to flat surfaces.
The military developers at Fort Belvoir are focused on detecting mines, not necessarily defusing them. But as technology advances, it may not be too long before drones can find and detonate land mines all at once, Mr. Johnson said.
“I could definitely see a future where a drone may find a mine, and then you have somebody who clicks a button that says, ‘Yes, that’s a mine,’ and they click another button to get rid of the mine,” he said. “I can see a lot more automation in this. That’s a conversation that we’re having now to start.”