Development and Test of the Humanitarian Demining Sifting Excavator
Abstract
The Humanitarian Demining Sifting Excavator has been developed to address the problem of finding and clearing deeply buried, mixed minefields. The motivation for the development came from a 2002 site assessment by the team of an existing mine problem in Honduras. Areas were identified containing both antipersonnel and antitank land mines buried up to 0.5 meters in mineralized soils. Conventional mine clearing techniques employed in the areas of interest had uncovered widespread evidence of these deeply buried mines, however, these techniques were unreliable for consistently finding mines buried at these depths. The Sifting Excavator was proposed and chosen as the best equipment and approach for addressing these mines. It is a multi-tooled, excavator based system for safely excavating and sifting land mines from soil. A compressed, two phase field test program was designed to run concurrently with the equipment development in order to allow the development of operational techniques and provide proof of principle testing even as the equipment was being fabricated. The equipment development and test program were conducted between June and September of 2003.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2003
- Accession Number
- ADA461839
Entities
People
- Christopher Wanner