Kashef Labs, a startup based at the American University in Cairo’s (AUC) incubator, is looking to clear Egypt of its lethal reminders of World War II.
Home to one in five land mines worldwide, Egypt has nearly 23 million explosives in the ground, 17.2m of them planted by occupying Italian and German forces during World War II. As well as providing a fatal hazard, the mines are also blocking attempts to use oil and gas reserves in the Egyptian desert, which the AUC estimates to be in the region of billions of barrels and trillions of cubic feet of gas.
Currently, mine clearing is not only extremely hazardous work, killing one mine-removal worker for every 5,000 removed, but is also slow and expensive, with the UN estimating costs of $300 to $1000 in cost to clear a single mine.
Kashef seeks to change that, following the development of low-flying prototype drone equipped with a low-weight, low-power ground-penetrating radar (GPR) which can identify buried objects, and matches them against a database of every type of landmine used by World War II forces.
Mohammed Gouda, co-founder of the mine-clearing drone, describes mine identification as a two-step process: “The first one is to identify metal objects. Stage two is the image construction to see what is under the ground. If [a detected object] is both metal and matches the dimensions of a known mine, we flag it as a mine.”
The team is looking to be able to go to market by 2015.
