Review of approaches to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, remote sensing and geographic information systems in humanitarian demining: Ukrainian case

Abstract

The history of the use of mines dates back almost two centuries. The geography of their use and the associated social harm have made them, without exaggeration, a global problem. At the same time, searches were underway for safe methods of their neutralization using various technical means. In so doing, until now, none of the existing methods provides a 100% guarantee of cleaning the territory, which determines the purpose of finding innovative methods and the possibility of combining them with existing ones. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming a real modern breakthrough in the field of intellectual achievements. Obtaining optimal results when solving a wide range of different problems, together with the development of composite materials, software, and the latest navigation equipment, make the tasks assigned to them and the expected results more and more difficult. UAVs allow people not to be in life-threatening conditions, to conduct activities beyond their physiological and psychophysiological abilities. The combination of the ability to collect spatial data during flight in various ranges of remote sensing with the possibility of carrying variants of useful equipment opens up prospects for their use in the field of demining territories. Supplementing UAV technologies with modern information systems for processing and analysis of information (expert systems, machine learning, computational intelligence, distributed artificial intelligence, neural networks, etc.), including spatial geographic information systems (GIS), opens up great prospects in the field of humanitarian demining of territories.