Humanise.org

Humanise's picture
Submitted by Humanise on 23 January 2010 - 6:21am
What's this idea about?
In less than 100 words, what is your idea?: 
An Open Source project to create a software oriented metal detector suitable for Humanitarian Demining and related research. The current specification for the initial set of modules makes the initial design usable as a research and education tool for researching methods to help in Humanitarian Demining and similar. There are many other uses that this can be used for and while these are generally supported and encouraged the main focus is design towards Humanitarian Demining. Full details on the project can be found at http://humanise.org
What is the social need or challenge your idea could address?: 
The first and primary goal is to help get rid of land mines in many poor countries such as Cambodia. There is also a big range of other Unexploded ordinances such as the left over bombs in Laos that it may be useful for finding. While the primary purpose of the designs is humanitarian demining, some designs or modules from the design are likely to find use elsewhere. Examples include: * Anti terrorist and other security screening. * Gold detectors and other geological exploration instruments. * Archaeology exploration. * Hobby coin detectors. * Underground pipe/cable/leak detectors. * Manufacturing uses such as detectors to help ensure contaminants don't enter our food supply. * Detectors used for separation and recovery of different types of recyclable material in waste management. * Medical uses. * A teaching tool. * Research uses. These other uses are allowed, encouraged and supported.
What’s really new about your idea?: 
Use of already created new technology for creating music in the home, that is use of the new 24 and 32 bit sound cards to create a top end metal detector suitable for humanitarian demining. Also use of some recent new Open Source projects, particularly GStreamer which effectively allows the majority of the project to use software that is already created rather than having to design just for the application.
Stage of development
What inspired you to come up with your idea in the first place?: 
The sudden availability at reasonable prices of spectacular advances in electronics (that is, advances in Sound card technology) that can be used for many purposes other than what they were designed for. Later on in the research the project became vastly more attractive with an understanding of what the GStreamer standard offers and how the ready availability of Open Source GStreamer software modules means that a large of the software work has already been completed without having to write any code. GStreamer is probably the main recent standard for creating modules for multimedia.
From 1-5, what stage of development would you say your idea is in? - Explain further: 
Stage 3. I have completed the following: Extensive research on the idea. Initial design including working out all the standards to use. Nearly full documentation on the concepts and the initial design. Creation of a website containing all of this. I believe that there is less work to do to complete it to a usable product, than the work already done. I haven't done the work of advertising this project yet. This means that up till now it has been one person project. It is now time to try to bring as many programmers and other helpers into the project.
What can we do for you?
Tell us what we can do for you: 
The next thing needed is to advertise this project to people who may be interested in helping. I particularly need programmers who can program in C or C++. I would like support from electronic engineers, sound engineers (particularly anyone knowing GStreamer) or people with DSP knowledge but none of this is absolutely necessary. The only people absolutely needed to complete to the first usable stage is people who can program in the C programming language. There is also work for other people such as people to create drawings for the current documentation etc. I have put in many hundreds of hours on what has already been done but I can't afford to continue this without some means of support. If there was interest in supporting this financially, I would be willing to work on this full time.
Select which are the one or two most important things that you need to help the development of your idea: 
Developer - to help you create your software
Funder - to give you some initial cash
If Social Innovation Camp is able to help push your idea forward, do you have the time or desire to take ownership of it?: 
Yes
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Humanise's picture

Re: Humanise.org

by Humanise - 28 Jan 2010 - 2:27am
There is a big difference between "should be achievable" and "is achievable". The Humanitarian Demining community have a strong dislike to anything that doesn't work 100 per cent. They believe that it is better not to demine an area than to remove 19 out 20 mines. People don't go to an area with lots of hidden mines. Take out most of the mines and people start using the land. So often it is the children that find remaining mines. There are many dozens of methods being attempted to find mines. Most work to some degree and often show great promise. Most of this is being done by commercial companies and even though many are funded by various grants etc, particularly Government grants, the commercial companies expect to 'commercialize' any thing that they succeed in. Even the Universities now want to 'commercialize' any thing they do. In other areas that I'm involved in such as Content Management Systems, there are large numbers of competing Open Source projects, each with large numbers of people working on them and each being given away for free. Strangely, in the design of products for Humanitarian demining, there is so little that is Open Source, Creative Commons or anything the provides Public Domain utility. The moment anybody thinks of anything new it is straight down to the patents office. A lot of the other methods find other uses. Assuming the aerial photography techniques you mentioned work with buried mines, they would be very attractive to the military in order to just locate the overall minefields. In war time situations, the military are often prepared to lose a few soldiers in order to get through mine fields quickly. In my research, I have found many methods. A lot of them have been biological such as training bees or rats etc. Most of them work but there is all sorts of problems with getting 100 out of 100 mines found. The two methods that continue to work at 100 per cent in the Humanitarian area are good quality traditional electromagnetic metal detectors and prodding with wooden sticks. Some areas continue to use the prodding with wooden sticks. The only other method that is making appreciable inroads into this is Ground Penetrating Radar. Good quality electromagnetic induction based metal detectors have an interesting problem. While they can find all the current mines, even the low metal ones, their problem is that they are too good at finding things. They find large amounts of metal scrap etc that is often in the same ground. The large number of false positives can get to the point that they might just as well prod everywhere with wooden sticks. Ultimately, the roadmap or path for the project is to use the product or create new products to continue to research methods that can reduce this. This is not a project to create one product. It is meant to be a continuing project. Induction metal detectors are split into two groups, Frequency Domain detectors and Time Domain detectors. The top end Time Domain Detectors are generally better for Gold detectors and the top end Frequency Domain detectors are generally better for demining. It swaps around in different areas. For example, in metal sands you would use Time Domain Detectors for demining. The first project is a Frequency Domain Detector. From there it can either go to imaging with arrays of coils or to combining a Frequency Domain with Time Domain detection. When we start combining Frequency Domain with Time Domain Detection we start hitting the problem of how to get around Patents with these being simple patents of obvious technology. One of the many advantages that I'm hoping for with the continuing project is the pre publication of technology before all the obvious stuff gets patented. The overall design being based on GStreamer is amazingly versatile. It can continue to be expanded or changed with extra modules etc with new modules that handle any data that 'Streams'. The initial design is handling Pulse Code Modulated (PCM) data which is very similar to sound but it could be almost anything. It allows a great variety of new techniques to be tried including quite different transducers. There is an amazing array of things that could be incorporated into the design. Where the project goes later will be up to the people in the project. The only requirement is that it will be open source or creative commons with the general good of the world in mind.
Ozziemedes's picture

Re: Humanise.org

by Ozziemedes - 27 Jan 2010 - 6:56pm
This should be achievable using image filtering technologies over aerial photography, with the filters tuned to the IR/UV signiatures of common land-mine components. I've seen the same kind of technology used to read "colour" frequencies of dope plants, blue-green algae, etc.. with very reliable results.

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