AI-enabled demining software tool to get upgrade under U.S. Army contract
NewsAugust 02, 2024
WOBURN, Mass. Defense-autonomy developers Scientific Systems announced a new contract with the U.S. Army’s Humanitarian Demining Research and Development (HD R&D) Program to upgrade its Buried Object Reporting and Identification System (BORIS), which is an artificial intelligence-enabled, platform-agnostic software tool for humanitarian clearance of unexploded ordnance (UXO) and range remediation.
According to the company's announcement, BORIS has been in field use for more than ten years by various nonmilitary humanitarian mine action organizations in countries including Cambodia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, and Ukraine and has also seen use during range remediation in areas where munitions, explosives, and other ordnance were developed, tested, and evaluated.
Scientific Systems describes the BORIS workflow as enabling operators to load data from various sensor platforms and obtain "dig sheets" of prioritized lists of UXO locations for UXO clearing. The software's integrated graphical user interface (GUI) facilitates interfacing with different sensor platforms and enables users to visualize raw and processed sensor data for quality inspection. More experienced users can explore the underlying data processing and customize the parameters for specific field requirements or operational environments. The internal data-processing algorithm enables automatic target recognition (ATR) capability and can fuse data from multiple sensor modalities to identify distinct patterns of UXO signal. The built-in ATR improves detection sensitivity to UXOs while mitigating false alarms, accelerating the speed of area clearing and enabling even novice operators to use the system effectively.
