Cobham develops more accurate landmine detector

An engineering team led by David Daniels of Cobham Technical Services has developed a new kind of mine detector, dubbed Minehound, which promises to spot deadly, explosive items with fewer false alarms than other comparable technologies on the market.

The product, which is currently being sold through German metal-detector manufacturer Vallon, was recently nominated for a Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award.

Daniels said the Minehound detector combines a ground-penetrating radar with a high-performance metal detector to increase detection performance. The current standard devices for mine detection are metal detectors, he said, but in many situations there can be 100 to 200 false alarms for each real mine found.

‘De-miners actually spend an awful lot of time excavating things that are quite benign because they can’t get any discrimination for the kind of target they’re interested in,’ he said.

The Minehound dual-detection system is reported to reduce the false alarm rate by a factor of up to seven.