The history of the use of mines dates back almost two centuries. The geography of their use and the associated social harm have made them, without exaggeration, a global problem. At the same time, searches were underway for safe methods of their neutralization using various technical means. In so doing, until now, none of the existing methods provides a 100% guarantee of cleaning the territory, which determines the purpose of finding innovative methods and the possibility of combining them with existing ones. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming a real modern breakthrough in the field of intellectual achievements. Obtaining optimal results when solving a wide range of different problems, together with the development of composite materials, software, and the latest navigation equipment, make the tasks assigned to them and the expected results more and more difficult. UAVs allow people not to be in life-threatening conditions, to conduct activities beyond their physiological and psychophysiological abilities. The combination of the ability to collect spatial data during flight in various ranges of remote sensing with the possibility of carrying variants of useful equipment opens up prospects for their use in the field of demining territories. Supplementing UAV technologies with modern information systems for processing and analysis of information (expert systems, machine learning, computational intelligence, distributed artificial intelligence, neural networks, etc.), including spatial geographic information systems (GIS), opens up great prospects in the field of humanitarian demining of territories.

The forthcoming era of massive drone delivery deployment in urban environments raises a need to develop reliable control and monitoring systems. While active solutions, i.e., wireless sharing of a real-time location between air traffic participants and control units, are of use, developing additional security layers is appealing. Among various surveillance systems, radars offer distinct advantages by operating effectively in harsh weather conditions and providing high-resolution reliable detection overextended ranges. However, contrary to traditional airborne targets, small drones and copters pose a significant problem for radar systems due to their relatively small radar cross sections (RCSs). Here, we propose an efficient approach to label drones by attaching passive resonant scatterers to their rotor blades. While blades themselves generate micro-Doppler rotor-specific signatures, those are typically hard to capture at large distances owing to small signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in radar echoes. Furthermore, drones from the same vendor are indistinguishable by their micro-Doppler signatures. Here, we demonstrate that equipping the blades with multiple resonant scatterers not only extends the drone detection range but also assigns it a unique micro-Doppler encoded identifier. By extrapolating the results of our laboratory and outdoor experiments to real high-grade radar surveillance systems, we estimate that the clear-sky identification range for a small drone is approximately 3–5 km, whereas it would be barely detectable at 1000 m if not labeled. This performance places the proposed passive system on par with its active counterparts, offering the clear benefits of reliability and resistance to jamming.

The article is devoted to the problem of the sequence of demining territories through the prism of examples of foreign experience and probable economic effects. As of 2023, Ukraine is the country in Europe most mined and affected by explosive objects, and given the continuation of the military conflict, the area of affected territories is already more than 250,000 km2 and will only grow. Cautiously optimistic forecasts estimate the duration of humanitarian demining in decades and hundreds of billions of dollars. Post-conflict experience convinces that every country facing the need to demine territories after the end of hostilities can solve this problem independently at the expense of budget funds and, therefore, turn to international and domestic providers of humanitarian demining services for help. New mines experience insidious complications, the cases of which are made of unusual materials (wood, plastic, etc.), form a different composition of explosive substances, which maximally changes the investigated physical properties and complicates the possibility of their further identification. Therefore, only some of the currently existing methods give a guarantee of 100% cleaning of the territory. Any accident in the cleared environments is not only a tragedy and loss but also the fear of refugees to return, peaceful living and activities. The cost and time required for demining are much more significant than manufacturing and installing mines. This motivates governments and scientific communities to find safe, fast, and accurate demining solutions. Given the vast areas and limited resources for rapid recovery and sustainable development, humanitarian demining measures should be prioritized. Based on this and considering foreign experience, approaches to the priority return to economic use of the most promising land plots should be substantiated. The results of the optimal use of such territories will form additional economical means for demining and speeding up the clearance of the remaining regions. Examples of the return to economic use of different types of land use according to their intended use are considered. Keywords: humanitarian demining; land use; land management; Sustainability; planning.

This paper presents the conceptual stages of the simulation and development of a modified transceiver antenna for a high-power pulsed nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) detector of explosives containing the ¹⁴N isotope. At a frequency of 4.645 MHz, better characteristics are obtained using a nine-turn coil shaped as half of a Fermat spiral with an outer radius of 75 mm. Using a COMSOL Multiphysics numerical parametric simulation and a materials browser, it was possible to calculate a physical system with parameters as close to reality as possible. According to the results of the experimental studies of the radio frequency (RF) energy, the proposed antenna features an increase in the working area compared to a similar antenna, the topology of the conductive coil of which has the form of an Archimedean spiral. The resulting diagrams of the distribution of the magnetic induction also indicate that the topology of the electromagnetic (EM) field does not depend on the orientation of the sample under study relative to the axis of the radial symmetry observed in square–rectangular planar antennas.

The history of active mine use spans nearly two centuries. In this relatively short historical period, mines have become a global problem. Explosive objects and mines, remnants of wars and military conflicts, continue to pose a threat to people residing in these areas for a long time. As of the beginning of 2023, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine reported that approximately 40% of the territory (over 250,000 km2) had been mined. In terms of the extent of mined land, the United Nations classifies Ukraine among the most heavily mined countries. The scale of mine contamination surpasses countries where military conflicts have lasted for decades. The invention and improvement of mines have contributed to the development of methods to counter them. Today, more than fifty different methods and their modifications are known, but none guarantee a 100% success rate, underscoring the relevance of further scientific research. The creation and use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been a significant breakthrough in the field of intellectual achievements. Innovations manifest in all aspects, from modern composite materials to state-of-the-art navigation equipment and software. UAVs are actively deployed in various areas of human activity, demonstrating excellent results. The primary advantage of UAVs in humanitarian demining is the safety they provide, allowing individuals to operate in hazardous conditions beyond physiological and psychophysiological capabilities. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a relatively new combination of information and telecommunications technologies whose popularity is rapidly growing, opening up previously unexplored possibilities for practical applications. UAV and IoT technologies do not fall into the traditional classification of humanitarian demining methods. However, they serve as a connecting link for implementing, based on them or with their direct participation, other technological solutions (including geoinformation system (GIS), neural networks, artificial intelligence, Big Data, etc.). The prospects of implementing 5G communication networks in Ukraine will enhance spatial accuracy when combining both technologies, which is especially crucial for humanitarian demining. The recent advancements in communication technologies, such as 5G, and programs like the IoT, play a crucial role in aerial communication using UAVs. Depending on the application and operational region, UAVs have also been utilized to enhance coverage and throughput in 5G wireless communication. In such cases, UAVs act as intermediate nodes or flying base stations. This helps conduct operations in remote and challenging-to-reach locations. The idea of integrating cloud computing with UAVs enhances their role by providing additional computational capabilities.

The paper presents the principle of a microwave adaptive band-pass filter based on the cascade of ring resonators. The filter is performed as a planar microstrip technology with thickness of around 1 mm to ensure compactness of the device. The ring resonators, being a part of metamaterials, can be considered as an equivalence of an oscillator and is conventionally used in the microwaves. While a quite number of the filters with predefined parameters are well-known, the adaptive filters the throughput and output characteristics of which can be adjusted depending on the input ones is the topical problematic nowadays and, at least, for the closest future. We have investigated in the paper the possibilities of adjustment the considered filter’s transmission characteristics through the ring design, distance between them, and discussed other features, which have impact. For example, it allows expanding of the filter bandwidth from 250 to 60 MHz for simultaneous change of a distance between the adjacent rings. We have suggested the approach how to do the filter time-dependent. A varactor diode inserted into the gap of the middle ring is controlled with an independent external source and can adjust the filter bandwidth from 80 up to 140 MHz for the varactor capacitance variation from 16 to 6 pF (bias voltage variation from 1 to 7 V) that covers the existing communication networks, such as mobile generations, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, etc. and can be applied for modern smart technologies of the Internet-of-Things for a remote control. It becomes possible because different sensing elements, such as photodiodes, Hall effect sensors, photoresistors, etc., can be exploited as the aforementioned external source.