Mine Clearing Corp. - Die Minensucher
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Haben eine gute Lösung, um das Landminenproblem auf der Welt zu lösen.
http://www.mineclearing.com/
NEWS RELEASE
Mine Clearing Corp. Appoints World‐Class Mine Detection Expert to Head Industry Development
Calgary, Canada (November 17, 2008) – Mine Clearing Corp. (“MCC”), (OTCBB: MCCO) is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Al Carruthers as Vice President – Industry Development.
With over 20 years experience and leadership in mine detection technology, Mr. Carruthers has extensive global experience and knowledge pertinent to MCC’s current and future development.
From 1985 to 1998, as project manager at Canadian Forces Defence Research Establishment Suffield (DRES), Mr. Carruthers managed numerous projects including the development of a remotely operated metallic mine detection system, a multi‐sensor landmine detection project, and was a research engineer for the development and design of demolition devices and explosive mine clearance devices.
As manager of the Canadian Centre for Mine Action Technology from 1998 to 2003, Mr. Carruthers managed a $20 million budget for the research and development of technology applicable to demining. Then from 2003 to 2007, as the Technology Officer at the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD), he was responsible for monitoring all new demining technology, was involved in developing, lab testing and field testing of new mine detection technology, and advised on the design, development and deployment of potential mine action technologies.
Mr. Carruthers also brings experience working in the challenging environments MCC will be engaged. He coordinated numerous demining equipment trials and evaluations in mine affected countries such as Croatia, Bosnia‐Herzegovina, Colombia, Laos, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia. He has also gained experience in developing nations via two UN tours of duty in India/Pakistan and Iraq.
Respected internationally as a mine detection technology expert, Mr. Carruthers helped develop the CEN Standards for the Test and Evaluation of Metal Detectors and for Mechanical Demining Equipmet; planned, organized and directed several technical conferences for mine action technologies; edited the GICHD Technology Newsletter; was editor of the 2005 edition of “Guidebook for Detection Technologies and Systems for Humanitarian Demining”; and is currently editing a guidebook for the design and testing of mechanical demining machines.
As Vice President Industry Development, Mr. Carruthers will be involved in research and development of our UAV‐based remote sensing system, and final product development and testing based on his extensive understanding of real life customer needs and preferences.
With his extensive high level and direct contacts in the international demining community, Mr Carruthers will assist in both strategic technology and business development, opening doors for MCC that only someone with his extensive experience and network can open.
In the operational stage Mr. Carruthers will play an integral role as MCC establishes manufacturing facilities and training centres, trains deminers and rolls out operations.
"We are truly privileged to have Al Carruthers join our executive team. Mr. Carruthers has the international and industry respect, experience and leadership to help drive the future growth and development of Mine Clearing Corp.", states Larry Olson, President of MCC. “He brings both real‐world know‐how and personal dedication to the critical challenge of reclaiming the millions of acres worldwide currently untouchable due t landmines.”
“I am very excited about the potential represented in Mine Clearing Corp.’s UAV‐based system. If it delivers what its current design suggests, then this technology will truly be an industry ‘killer app.’”, Al Carruthers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjCdLlctzBI
AL CARRUTHERS
Vice President - Industry Development
With over 20 years experience and leadership in mine detection technology, Mr. Carruthers has extensive global experience and knowledge pertinent to MCC’s current and future development.
From 1985 to 1998, as project manager at Canadian Forces Defence Research Establishment Suffield (DRES), Mr. Carruthers managed numerous projects including the development of a remotely operated metallic mine detection system, a multi-sensor landmine detection project, and was a research engineer for the development and design of demolition devices and explosive mine clearance devices.
As manager of the Canadian Centre for Mine Action Technology from 1998 to 2003, Mr. Carruthers managed a $20 million budget for the research and development of technology applicable to demining. Then from 2003 to 2007, as the Technology Officer at the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD), he was responsible for monitoring all new demining technology, was involved in developing, lab testing and field testing of new mine detection technology, and advised on the design, development and deployment of potential mine action technologies.
Mr. Carruthers also brings experience working in the challenging environments MCC will be engaged. He coordinated numerous demining equipment trials and evaluations in mine affected countries such as Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, Laos, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia. He has also gained experience in developing nations via two UN tours of duty in India/Pakistan and Iraq.
Respected internationally as a mine detection technology expert, Mr. Carruthers helped develop the CEN Standards for the Test and Evaluation of Metal Detectors and for Mechanical Demining Equipment; planned, organized and directed several technical conferences for mine action technologies; edited the GICHD Technology Newsletter; was editor of the 2005 edition of “Guidebook for Detection Technologies and Systems for Humanitarian Demining”; and is currently editing a guidebook for the design and testing of mechanical demining machines.
As Vice President Industry Development, Mr. Carruthers will be involved in research and development of our UAV-based remote sensing system, and final product development and testing based on his extensive understanding of real life customer needs and preferences.
With his extensive high level and direct contacts in the international demining community, Mr. Carruthers will assist in both strategic technology and business development, opening doors for MCC that only someone with his extensive experience and network can open.
In the operational stage Mr. Carruthers will play an integral role as MCC establishes manufacturing facilities and training centres, trains deminers and rolls out operations.
DR. PIERRE ZAKARAUSKAS
Executive Director - Technology & Product Development
Pierre Zakarauskas, is a scientist, inventor and entrepreneur. Pierre received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of British Columbia in 1984. He spent 11 years as a defence scientist for the Canadian Department of National Defence conducting research in submarine detection. Pierre co-founded a successful high tech company, Wavemakers Inc., that developed signal processing software for hands free cell phones used in the challenging car environment. At Wavemakers Inc., Pierre successively held the posts of President, Vice President of Research and Development, and Chief Technology Officer. Wavemakers was acquired by Harman International Industries (NYSE:HAR) in July 2003.
Dr. Zakarauskas is currently CEO of Zak Technology Inc., a venture dedicated to developing and applying signal processing to humanitarian problems such as landmine detection. He has filed a patent for a device to detect landmines in heavily forested areas.
Al Carruthers ist auch beim DRDC - Defence Research and Development Canada (Defence)
Er scheint Spezialist für die Bewertung von Minenräumungstechnologien zu sein.
Mine Action Technology Newsletter 8
June 2006 Issue No. 4 , da ist einiges von Carruthers drin.
Posted on ZDNet News: Jul 10, 2006 7:23:00 PM
The search for land mines is not something done in haste. Nor, as it turns out, is the search for new technology that could be used to find mines.
Despite a lot of promises about high-tech advances, people working in land mine clearance are using technology that hasn't changed dramatically since the Second World War. And a lot of them say that--given the risks of using technology that's still in its shakeout period--they'd just as soon stick with the tried-and-true.
"We need more of what we know works, rather than new technologies," said Noel Mulliner, technology coordinator for the U.N. Mine Action Service. "New technology is not going to get into the field fast enough. We want more of the simple stuff."
Land mines are a serious problem in many countries, from postconflict places like Bosnia to simmering trouble spots such as Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. Along with unexploded hand grenades, mortar rounds and artillery submunitions, they are a potentially deadly litter from battle and can persist often many years after a cease-fire has been reached. Casualties run into the tens of thousands a year, according to estimates.
Over the years, there's been no shortage of clever ideas for finding and eliminating mines, from training bees and rats to sniff out explosives to using lasers to detonate mines and other ordnance. The problem is that those that aren't completely far-fetched can take too long to get off the drawing board or cost too much for cash-strapped humanitarian demining operations.
The most promising advance, just now getting into the field, involves a variation on the common metal detector--combining it with ground-penetrating radar into a multisensor system called HSTAMIDS. The U.S. military has been using it for a couple of years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a version for civilian use is going through trials.
Other, more mundane forms of high tech, such as Internet hookups and Google Earth, are also starting to find more widespread use in the field of humanitarian demining. They can be of help in the remote areas typically targeted in efforts by civilian and nongovernmental organizations to remove land mines from former battle zones.
The goal here isn't a military one, with an army trying to speed from one point to another across defensive positions and under fire from an enemy force. Rather, it's an effort--at once global and local--to return communities to normal life, so that civilians can go about their daily business of raising crops, accessing potable water, taking goods to markets and just letting children out to play.
"It doesn't take too many mines to keep people from using a road," said Al Carruthers, technology officer for the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining.
Counting the cost
Precise numbers of victims are hard to come by. The best estimate by Landmine Monitor, the reporting arm of the International Committee to Ban Landmines, is that there are between 15,000 and 20,000 new casualties each year; in the 2004-2005 reporting period, those injuries occurred in 58 countries.
It's not just fatalities that are a concern. Antipersonnel land mines tend to be designed to maim, rather than kill, resulting in the loss of a foot or a hand, or some other debilitating wound.
Scent of a mine
When metal detectors can't give a precise reading of what's in the ground, send in the dogs. Or the bees.
Read about alternatives to detectors here
The exact number of land mines is also elusive, with worldwide figures ranging well into the millions. On the positive side, it appears that fewer are now going into the ground than are coming out, but the problem of clearance remains a daunting one.
Often, the countries most in need of assistance are those facing significant financial problems--they're developing economies further weighed down by the overall costs of recovering from war. Because they don't have a lot of money to spend, they're not the most promising customers for companies that build gear such as chemical sensors and armor-plated trucks. Instead, those companies tend to focus on military buyers, and the R&D and resulting equipment may later trickle down to nonmilitary groups.
"There's a much higher priority for people who have big bucks," Mulliner said.
In addition, demining gear has to be tough enough for sometimes rough handling in rugged terrain and a variety of climates, from rocky mountains to dense forests.
So while there's great promise in some high-tech options, said Dennis Barlow, director of the Mine Action Information Center at James Madison University, "generally, the greater promise...is still going to be whether (demining) can be done in a low-cost, low-tech way."
Right now, the most common machinery for finding land mines is the metal detector, swept back and forth in a slow and painstaking trek across suspect terrain. The deminers then get down on their hands and knees to gently probe the ground and scrape away the soil. Explosives-sniffing dogs are sometimes used to find mines at the outset, but they're still a relative rarity and more often are used in a quality assurance role after a sweep.
"What works today in land mines is lots of metal detectors," Mulliner said.
What they find, however, isn't always a land mine, or any other explosive. That's because the metal detectors live up to their name, pinging whenever they come across a wide range of metal objects. On a former battlefield, that can mean a lot of noise from harmless shell fragments, vehicle parts and other military gear. And in some areas, villagers have been known to use mine fields as dumps, meaning a ping could as easily be from an old nail as a land mine.
Metal detectors also have to contend with variations in soil content, humidity and other factors.
One tool that is helping to distinguish mines from clutter is HSTAMIDS, short for "handheld standoff mine detection system," which was developed by the U.S. Army in a research project reaching back into the mid-1990s.
Listening and looking
HSTAMIDS is a dual-sensor system. Its electromagnetic induction metal detector listens for echoes from a mine's metal casing or components, while its ground-penetrating radar, or GPR, looks at the shape of objects below the ground. Software helps compensate for ground conditions.
Most of the time, an operator "is going to hear a metal signature, then see if he can get a consistent GPR return," said Bob Doheny, a Department of Defense official focused on special operations and low-intensity conflict.
The civilian version of the system is undergoing long-term evaluation in Cambodia, Thailand and Afghanistan. In Cambodia, where testing began in April, the speed of detection using HSTAMIDS is nearly six times that of a metal detector by itself, primarily because of the ability to discriminate clutter, Doheny said.
"That will greatly assist the human deminer in speeding up his clearance process, because he will not have to dig up 10, 20, 30 pieces of metal for each mine he clears," the U.N.'s Mulliner said.
But it's not cheap. In high-volume production, the military version costs about $17,000 apiece. That version has features that humanitarian deminers wouldn't need, including the ability to work underwater and at night, and to be dropped by parachute from an airplane. "We're not sure what a pure demining version would cost," Doheny said. "We're working to make it more affordable."
By contrast, standard metal detectors cost between about $2,000 and $5,000 each.
The metal detector used in HSTAMIDS is the MineLab model F3, originally developed and proven for gold mining, which is one of a new generation of ground-compensating devices that can cancel the influence of electromagnetic soil. It gets good marks in its own right, but like all gear redeployed to hunt for land mines, it had to go through a transition period.
"The major challenge with making this machine (the F3) most useful for demining was in making it easy to operate and durable enough to withstand almost continual use by unsophisticated operators. The technology was already there and proven, but the packaging had to be realistic for the context in which it would be used," Andy Smith, an independent consultant who has worked with the U.S. government, the U.N. Mine Action Service and the GICHD, wrote in an e-mail.
Smith offers a cautionary note about HSTAMIDS: "With small antipersonnel mines, in rocky ground with trees, roots and very wet or very dry areas, the GPR is unreliable. A deminer who relied on its readout would be gambling." The system, he wrote, "could make demining faster--which can be very important for a soldier under fire--but only by increasing the risk of leaving something behind."
The Defense Department's Doheny says those working with the system are getting a thorough introduction that targets 15 types of mines, including low-metallic ones, and both antipersonnel and antitank ones.
"After about 10 days of training, they're very good," he said. "If there's any question with the GPR that it might be a mine...we call it a mine. We don't want any false negatives."
Low-metal sniffer
A self-propelled GPR system that's designed to find low-metal antitank mines is the MineStalker, from a company called Niitek. The device also promises to find those that are buried deeper and are tougher to find with a metal detector. It's been tested in Angola and Namibia.
Slow and steady probing isn't the only way to deal with a known or suspected minefield. It can also be pummeled or plowed by heavy equipment. Some demining programs, including the one in Croatia, have made a big investment in armor-plated mechanical gear such as tillers and flails. This is expensive equipment, with prices ranging from $100,000 to $1.5 million.
Even the best of those devices, though, can't be guaranteed to find all the land mines, and it's 100 percent elimination that's the goal of humanitarian demining. The big machines are relatively crude tools that still require people to go in to do quality checks--and further digging.
"No one is yet happy that a machine is capable of clearing an area," Mulliner of the U.N. Mine Action Service said. "Machines are used because of a low threat in the area. Machines are never used in a primary role of clearing yet."
Meanwhile, demining teams in the field are starting to make more thorough use of GPS tools, geographical information systems and satellite imagery for scoping out areas and recording their findings.
"I used Google Earth to look at a mined area in the desert recently and could see that there were many burned-out vehicle wrecks in the area--which means that I know I will need to take machines to move those and may need to deploy extra skills to deal with the damaged ammunition that may be in them," Smith wrote.
But that just gives an overall sense of an area. It doesn't begin to pinpoint the actual mines, which brings things back to metal detectors and HSTAMIDS.
"The key to the whole thing is detection. In the demining world, if you can find it, you can deal with it," Carruthers said. "There isn't anything in the next couple years that's going to happen except multisensor (technology)."
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-148732.html
January 22, 2009 6:00 AM PST
Pinpointing landmines from the air
by Mark Rutherford Font size Print E-mail Share Post a comment Yahoo! Buzz(Credit: MCC)
Landmine "contamination" continues to plague developing countries, where more are laid every year than are cleared, according to a UN estimate. Now, a company promises a new technique to locate and map landmines from the air-three times faster and at half the price of conventional detection methods.
A Canadian company, Mine Clearing Corp (MCC) has acquired licensing to the latest in radiometry technology; technology so sensitive it can pick out the tiny electromagnetic reflections emitted by buried objects from as high as 200 feet in the air. MCC plans to incorporate this technology into a landmine detection and GPS scan-to-map system that uses Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) able to pinpoint a landmine to within 20 inches- thus finding the "needle in the haystack" before anyone sets foot in the minefield, according to the company.
Once in the minefield, the company offers a handheld detection unit for use at ground level. Called Fig8, due to its figure eight antenna conductor loops, the detector is powered by the kinetic energy generated by sweeping the unit from side to side - "perfect for third-world countries as it needs no batteries".
The system uses patented sensor technology called "cold sky." It was developed by Roke Manor Research Ltd, a Siemens subsidiary who licensed it to MCC, (formerly Peak Resources.)
Conventional landmine removal involves probing very square foot of suspected terrain. It doesn't matter whether it's done mechanically, or by people, or by trained rats, it's expensive, time consuming and dangerous. Planting them, on the other hand, is quick and cheap.
There could be more than 100 million active landmines scattered in over 80 countries, according to some estimates. The United Nations reckons every 20 minutes someone, somewhere in the world is killed or maimed by a landmine, this despite close to $500 million allocated each year to clearing efforts.
"We are confident that this licensing agreement will allow us to bring practical low cost mine clearance to those countries where abandoned mines continue to wreak a terrible cost on human life," said Roke Managing Director David Smith.
Potential clients for the new detector include NGOs and commercial enterprises such as oil and gas, mining, agriculture and utilities companies in addition to traditional military customers