Such devices are urgently needed. Ninety million live mines are still scattered throughout former war zones from Afghanistan to Vietnam, and by some estimates they maim and kill 15,000 people a year. Since demining workers use standard metal detectors, which also pick up nails, hairpins and empty beer cans, finding the buried explosives is a slow business. At the curent pace, experts say, it will take 600 years to remove the weapons now in place along paths and roads. In the meantime, the abandoned mines will continue to shatter communities and kill innocents. “These hidden killers maim children,” says Tomita. “We shouldn’t leave them buried.”
To develop a portable radar detector that could speed things up a bit, Tomita enlisted the cooperation of Omron, Sharp and IBM Japan. In 1998 he formed a non-profit organization, the Japan Alliance for Humanitarian Demining Support (JAHDS). The result is a new device that he calls Mine Eye, which can detect and identify the weapons underground. One recent afternoon in a wooded slope near Tokyo, Tomita put his invention to the test on dummy mines. A technician wearing six kilograms of equipment on his back scanned the ground with what looked like a metal detector. As he moved the detector head back and forth, however, it sent a radar beam a foot into the ground, which was reflected back into the detector. The backpack computer instantaneously translated the reflected beam into a map shown on a liquid-crystal display on the backpack’s shoulder strap, revealing the explosives buried in the area immediately in front of the technician.
In December Mine Eye underwent field trials along the Thai-Cambodian border. Now Tomita expects deminers to begin using the device in the spring. “Geo Search has achieved a great deal to turn a difficult concept into a working tool,” says Patrick Blagden, technical director for the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining.
In Japan, big humanitarian organizations are usually funded by the government, but JAHDS is a rare exception. Some 200 Japanese companies, including Toyota, IBM Japan, Sony, Honda and Japan Airlines, donate goods, services or expertise to the group, helping it meet its $3 million annual budget. Hishawi Owada, a JAHDS director and former Japanese ambassador to the United Nations, calls it “a totally new concept of what an NGO can do.”
There’s no shortage of research on demining technologies. A team of researchers from Chiba University have developed Comet 1, a six-legged mechanical crab that can tiptoe through a minefield at 100 meters per hour. It has metal detectors mounted on each foot. The same team is also working on a mine-detecting drone helicopter. Researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have built a turtlelike robot, VK-1, that can dig up and detonate land mines. Another robot slithers like a snake over rough terrain. “I truly want to use robots for demining,” says Shigeo Hirose, a professor at the institute. “But we need more funds and cooperation, otherwise it could take 20 or 30 years.”
Researchers in the United States and Europe are also developing radar detectors and demining robots. Perhaps the most sought-after solution to finding land mines, and the most speculative, is to make an artificial nose that can detect the subtle vapors that the mines emit. Even if all these efforts prove to be successful, there should still be plenty of work to go around.
