Artificial intelligence is aiming to drastically reduce the time and costs of manually surveying Ukrainian farmland potentially contaminated by landmines and unexploded ordnance.
The relevant project will be implemented by Ukraine’s agriholding Nibulon jointly with U.S.-based Safe Pro Group, provider of an AI-powered drone demining ecosystem, BusinessWire reports, according to Ukrinform.
The American operator specializing in drone imagery processing, said it has entered into a multi-year Memorandum of Understanding with Nibulon on addressing Ukraine’s agriculture crisis which has sustained billions in damages and losses due to the ongoing war.
According to NASA Harvest, the war in Ukraine has caused the abandonment of between 5.2 and 6.9 million acres of farmland costing Ukraine around $2 billion in lost crops in 2023 that could have fed upwards of 25 million people for an entire year.
The enormous area of land, located along the front lines of the war and in areas that have recently been retaken by Ukraine, can be potentially surveyed to determine the precise location of mines and UXO.
By incorporating AI capabilities into land surveys, the Ukrainian company’s drone teams are expected to more effectively generate high resolution maps with precise locations of mines and UXO in agricultural areas that would otherwise not be accessible to direct human observation.
Safe Pro’s proprietary AI models have analyzed more than 931,107 drone images in Ukraine, pinpointing over 18,300 explosive remnants of war across 4,255 hectares. While AI analyzes each drone image in less than 0.2 seconds, traditional human analysis can take several minutes per image – a process that could span decades if done manually.
The company says maps drawn up by the platform can provide a “bird’s-eye view” of the surveyed area, delivering enhanced situational awareness for planning clearing and land release efforts by local governments and humanitarian aid organizations.
As Ukrinform reported earlier, referring to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, the Demining Capabilities Coalition will soon make its first procurement in 2025 for the needs of clearing Ukrainian territories of explosives, worth over EUR 30 million.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, sappers have returned 35,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian land to use, of which about 17,000 square kilometers were demined in 2024.
Source: AI-powered drone platform to help demine Ukrainian farmlands
