Biography:Motoyuki Sato received the B.E., M.E degrees, and Dr. Eng. degree in information engineering from the Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, in 1980, 1982 and 1985, respectively. Since 1997 he is a professor at Tohoku University and a distinguished professor of Tohoku University since 2007, and he was the Director of Center for Northeast Asian Studies, Tohoku University during 2009-2013. In 1988, he was a visiting researcher at the Federal German Institute for Geoscience and Natural Resources (BGR) in Hannover, Germany. His current interests include transient electromagnetics and antennas, radar polarimetry, ground penetrating radar (GPR), borehole radar, electromagnetic induction sensing, interferometric and polarimetric SAR. He has conducted the development of GPR sensors for humanitarian demining, and his sensor ALIS which is a hand-held dual sensor, has detected more than 80 mines in mine fields in Cambodia. He received 2014 Frank Frischknecht Leadership Award from SEG for his contribution to his sustained and important contributions to near-surface geophysics in the field of ground-penetrating radar. He received IEICE Best paper award (Kiyasu Award), and IEEE Ulrich L. Rohde Innovative Conference Paper Awards on Antenna Measurements and Applications both in 2017. He is a visiting Professor at Jilin University, China, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, and Mongolian University of Science and Technology.
Title: GPR applied to Humanitarian Demining and UXO clearance
Abstract: Humanitarian demining and UXO clearance have gathered interest all over the world last 20 years, however, it is still quite important activity in many mine/UXO affected countries. Since the Ottawa treaty established in 1997, land mine problems have been widely known, and we have continued efforts to demolish all the landmines including buried mines in mine affected countries. Even though, we have noticed that in many mine affected countries, mine clearance is not an easy task and we have to continue this effort. It is reported that accidents caused by landmines occurred in 56 countries in 2016, and more than 9,000 people were killed or injured. As of November 2017, landmines remains in 61 countries.
In order to detect buried landmines and UXO, electromagnetic techniques have widely been used. Electromagnetic Induction Sensor (EMI sensor) is one of the most commonly used sensor for detection of metal objects. Most of UXO are made of metal and most types of landmines contain metal components, which can be detected by EMI sensor. In addition, recently, Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) has also been used for humanitarian demining, because it can detect non-metal objects. In this workshop, at first I will introduce these techniques.
Then, we introduce more actual activities. Tohoku University has developed ALIS for humanitarian demining. ALIS is a handheld “Dual sensor” which combines EMI sensor and GPR. This is a hand held sensor, equipped with position tracking system, therefore ALIS can acquire the EMI and GPR signal together with its position information, while it is scanned on the ground surface by an operator by hand manually. Then, the data can be processed using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) processing (migration) and can reconstruct 3-D subsurface image. GPR of ALIS operates at 1-3GHz, and the penetration depth of the GPR is 20- 50cm. The development of ALIS started in 2002, and after evaluation test in some mine affected countries including Afghanistan, a long-term evaluation test has been conducted in Cambodia since 2009.We found that the prototype of ALIS is capable for imaging buried mines, and can reduce the false alarm ratio drastically. We have detected more than 80 buried land mines in Cambodia mine fields. The ALIS is based on these practical evaluation conducted together with CMAC (Cambodian Mine Action Center). The new ALIS system is compact and light weight which is less than 3.1kg, and can be used for more than 6 hours. It was evaluated in CMAC test site in 2018, and we demonstrated its high performance.