Mechanically efficient and innovatively designed robots equipped with reliable detection techniques can not only help in greatly reducing the time needed to clear an area inflicted with land-mines but also reduce the life threats to individual deminers. However, prohibitive costs and reliability issues have thus far been hindering the wide scale deployment of robotic technologies in this area, ...

Current results are presented on the research and development of the advanced humanitarian landmine detection system by using a compact discharge-type fusion neutron source called IECF (Inertial-Electrostatic Confinement fusion) devices. A water-jacketed IEC device(IEC20C) of a 20 cm inner diameter is operated to produce 10 neutrons/s stably in CW mode for 80 kV and 80 mA. Ample 10.8 MeV γ rays...

CONTEXT Afghanistan is one of the countries most affected by injuries due to landmines and unexploded ordnance. OBJECTIVE To understand the epidemiological patterns and risk factors for injury due to landmines and unexploded ordnance. DESIGN AND SETTING Analysis of surveillance data on landmine and unexploded ordnance injuries in Afghanistan collected by the International Committee of the R...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To determine commonalities of landmine victim risk factors in two very different countries. DESIGN AND SETTING Data on 249 communities in Chad and 530 in Thailand were collected during 2000-2001 as part of the Global Landmine Survey. Community level variables were analysed in a series of Poisson mixture models with number of landmine victims as the dependent variable. Models d...

The Polymer Diagnostics Section (Code 6122) of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has expertise in solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR). In 1983, NRL established an interagency agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to advise the FAA on NMR methods to detect explosives. We were aware of ear...

MIMO array can obtain much more equivalent elements by using a small number of transmitters and receivers. However, according to traditional sampling theorem, a certain number of transmitters and receivers are still needed to obtain a dense equivalent array. Since the interesting targets of ground penetrating radar (GPR) are usually sparse, this paper presents a spare MIMO array GPR imaging sch...

Since the human eye is insensitive to polarization, there is a large amount of information in many situations, which is not readily utilized. Measuring the polarization state of light is useful in many research fields including biology, chemistry, astronomy and remote sensing. The first portion of the paper discusses the simple application of accurately measuring the retardance value and fast a...

We demonstrate that objects buried in sand (1 to 4 mm deep) may be selectively imaged according to their chemical composition through spectral analysis of the laser-induced breakdown signal. The signal is generated by loosely focused femtosecond laser pulses having energies ranging from 0.5 to 2.5 mJ. We determine the depth from which a spectral signal may be measured as a function of pulse ene...

In this paper, we present the Synchronous Impulse Reconstruction Radar (SIRE) Ultra-wideband (UWB) radar designed by the Army Research Lab (ARL) for landmine and improvised explosive device (IED) detection as a 2 by 16 MIMO radar (with collocated antennas). Its improvement over its SIMO counterpart in terms of beampattern/cross range resolution are discussed and demonstrated using simulated dat...