ABSTRACT. In NATO Science for Peace and Security Project G5731 “Demining Robots”, the team of the University of Florence, Institute for Radiophysics and Electronics National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Franklin & Marshall College, and Jordan University of Science and Technology are building three cooperating robotic vehicles for detection of tripwires and surface threats (scatterable mines, IED’s, etc.) as well as buried metallic and minimal metal mines. The goal is to detect threats and discriminate them from harmless but ubiquitous clutter using optoelectronic sensors, metal detector, and holographic subsurface radar. Originally, a fourth robot carrying a 1-transmitter, 4-reciever impulse subsurface radar was designed and nearing completion when the invasion of Ukraine forced a pause in that work. The design of three robot team follows the new paradigm of industry 4.0 which involves interacting cyber-physical systems that are reproducible everywhere using open-source coding and hardware plans, 3-D printed parts, and an inexpensive off-the-shelf platform. The designs are also expandable to adapt to different sensors and actuators. The robots share information locally between them using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a base station radio link, but can be operated at a safe (even intercontinental) distance through a web interface. The proposed field operations will involve first a scan of the area of interest along parallel lanes (i.e., a Greek line pattern) by Robot 1 equipped with a high resolution, gimbal-mounted camera running a segmented line detection algorithm for tripwire detection, and a terrestrial LiDAR for obstacle mapping. Robot 2 will follow the same Greek line with a high sensitivity, high spatial resolution sweeping metal detector which will record the locations of buried metallic targets as well as “heat maps” of the targets for comparison/fusion with subsurface radar images.  A robot with a subsurface impulse radar was intended to follow on the Greek line path to detect both metallic and non-metallic buried targets but work on this is paused during the invasion. The final Robot 3 will visit the targets detected by the previous robot sensors and will interrogate them by recording a holographic subsurface radar image. Fusion of the optoelectronic, metal detector and subsurface radar data will allow discrimination of potential explosive threats from harmless clutter with the discrimination effectiveness evaluated using ROC curve analysis. This project is on schedule for a test using buried and scattered landmine simulants in mid-2023.

ABSTRACT. We revisit the history of development and operation of the first-ever orbital X-band real aperture side-looking radar (RA-SLR) onboard the USSR satellite “Cosmos-1500.” This radar was conceived, designed and tested in the early 1980s, and then supervised in orbit, by the team of Ukrainian scientists and engineers led by Professor Anatoly Kalmykov at the O. Y. Usikov Institute of Radiophysics and Electronics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (IRE NASU). It had original 12-m deployable slotted-waveguide antenna and onboard signal processing unit. Instead of planned experiments, only five days after placement into the polar Earth orbit in the autumn of 1983, SLR of Cosmos-1500 rendered truly outstanding service. It provided a stream of microwave images of the polar sea ice conditions that enabled the rescue of the freighters in the Arctic Ocean. However, the way to success was far from smooth. Besides of the technical problems, A. Kalmykov had to overcome the jealousy and hostility of both his home institute administration and the USSR bureaucracy. Later, SLR of “Cosmos-1500” was released to the industry and became the main instrument of the USSR and Russian series of remote sensing satellites “Okean” and Ukrainian satellites “Sich-1” and “Sich-2.” We believe that SLR of “Cosmos-1500” is a perfect candidate to the status of IEEE Milestone in Ukraine.