What a good idea! Night time recon of minefield, map them all and then plan the assault I guess. Wonder how effective these really are. After all, Russia could start using something similar, too.

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That has quite a bit of limitations for that kind of use. Data logged can vary even several meters (as I assume it's GPS based) and I don't think it can differentiate between a mine and any other shrapnel laying around. What it can do is go trough fields quickly and offer coordinates for people to go in and manually verify & clean the area so they get at least a majority of things cleaned up faster than having boots on the ground sweeping every square meter manually.

And if that kind of drone was widely used to map out routes for tanks and other equipment it would offer an option to create artificial path and bury in C4 or some other explosive in the way which is invisible to metal detector.

[–] Hopfgeist@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago

Augmented GPS can offer much better resolution, reliably on the order of a few Decimetres, if you have a reference receiver/transmitter with precisely known location nearby. GPS has very clever tricks up its sleeve if you know how to use them (which I assume the AFU do).

[–] cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Have it plant trackers or flags

[–] Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As someone with a metal detector, those things are incredibly sensitive. A gold coin and an aluminium can pull tab both pretty much give the same signal. I'd imagine that finding mines with just that would be incredibly inefficient since it's going to be mostly just false alarms and metal is everywhere. Some new version I heard about combined metal detector with a ground penetrating radar of some sort and that thing gave much better results.

[–] MrSpArkle@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Erring on the side of caution is preferable in this case.

[–] Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Oh sure. What I meant to highlight there is the sheer amount of work that's needed to clear these lands of mines. Currently that pretty much means dividing the ground into 1 x 1 meter grid and going square by square.

[–] CADmonkey@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The sensitivity on the crappy metal detector I have can be adjusted.

[–] Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah ferrous metals give a different signal that copper, bronze or aluminium. I'd imagine mines contain all kinds of metals so you can probably ignore some of the signals. Though then there's also those tiny bomblets that I think have no metal in them whatsoever and detonate from the pressure of your feet.