The current US army strategy to deal with such situations is to breach or clear lines of communication through minefields, clearly demarcating the cleared borders, and moving through as quickly as possible. For example, the presence of a large number of mines and unexploded ordnance in both the immediate and surrounding areas of the Bagram and Kandahar airfields in Afghanistan proved to be a significant factor in slowing down US and allied military operations. This approach of operating in enemy territory with remnant forces still active presents new challenges. Now, enemy territory tends to be occupied for extended periods of time and operations are started from secured areas within that space. They are less frequently mounted from friendly territory to enemy territory most often because of political pressure. Recent conflicts such as Operation Enduring Freedom illustrates significant divergence from the usual pattern of operations that developed since the Vietnam War. Compounding to this problem, while modern landmines tend to have a timed self-neutralizing mechanism, cheap landmines are likely to be unsophisticated and thus live until they are neutralized manually. Landmines are cheap to manufacture, one study cites costs as low as $3.00, and are currently effective weapons against armies with disproportionately powerful weaponry. Background & Literature There is a growing consensus that the nature of modern warfare will be increasingly asymmetric where a weaker force will use guerilla, stealth and terrorist tactic against a stronger opponent instead of direct force-to-force confrontation. This assistive technology will provide such individuals with opportunities to create auditory landmarks and to share spatial information in order to solve wayfinding problems. We also explain how the same proposed technology can be adapted to function as a novel navigation aid for visually impaired or blind individuals by unplugging its visual display component. We conjecture that this approach for enhancing threat awareness is likely to reduce the incidence of mine and UXO related injuries. To avoid war fighter cognitive and physical overload, the mine information is communicated as spatial auditory alerts or augmented reality visual alerts. GPS-facilitated, the system tracks the location of combatants and pushes to them relevant information about landmines in their vicinity. It demonstrates how threat discovery data, APL/UXO locations and possibly their blast radii, can be captured collaboratively to create a shareable spatial APL/UXO database. Abstract MineAware is a minimally obtrusive, wearable system that will allow ground troops to jointly create and share a common knowledge base of APL/UXO locations.
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