AI drone-imagery system passes 50,000 landmine detections to help clear Ukraine

Long after the fighting moves on, landmines and unexploded ordnance keep killing and maiming civilians, and clearing them is painstaking, dangerous work. On May 26, 2026, the technology company Safe Pro Group announced a milestone in that work: its AI system has now surpassed 50,000 detections of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) in Ukraine, where the company has operated for more than three years.

The system, called SPOTD (Safe Pro Object Threat Detection), analyzes ordinary, commercially available drone imagery using machine learning trained to recognize more than 150 types of explosive threats. Rather than sending people to walk every square meter of suspected ground, deminers fly drones overhead; SPOTD processes the images and converts raw aerial data into 2D and 3D maps, powered by cloud computing, that show where threats are likely to be. The company reports a dataset of 2.75 million drone images and more than 35,000 acres surveyed.

The point of all this is to make demining faster and safer for the humans who do it. By flagging likely threats from the air, the technology helps clearance teams prioritize where to send specialists and reduces the time people spend exposed in hazardous areas. Safe Pro works in partnership with Ukrainian agencies including the State Emergency Services and the National Mine Action Center, and marked the 50,000-detection milestone with a 50,000-dollar donation toward Ukrainian college education.

As with any AI detection tool, the technology is an aid, not a guarantee: human deminers still verify and remove every device by hand, and aerial detection complements rather than replaces the careful, methodical ground work that ultimately makes land safe. Aerial imagery also has limits, since some buried or obscured threats are hard to see from above, which is one reason the system is positioned as a way to prioritize and speed up clearance rather than to certify ground as clear. The announcement comes from the company itself, with the usual forward-looking caveats common to corporate press releases. But the underlying contribution is concrete and humane: faster surveying, fewer hours spent exposed in dangerous fields, and a clearer map of where the threats lie. As CEO Dan Erdberg put it, the company is "looking forward to a day where we can help achieve our global mission of enabling all civilians to return to their lands, schools and places of work without fear."