Inside The Race To Clear Ukraine’s Minefields With Robots And AI

Inside an old Soviet-era factory on the banks of the Dnipro River, the past and future of warfare sit side by side. Rusting industrial equipment from another century shares space with sleek ground robots trained to detect landmines.

Ukraine is now the most heavily mined country in the world. According to the United Nations, an estimated 23% of Ukraine’s territory may be contaminated with landmines and unexploded ordnance.

Clearing them is painstakingly slow and dangerous, and the World Bank estimates the effort could stretch over years and cost more than $37 billion. According to Globsec, with traditional tools it would take 757 years to fully demine the country.

Earlier this month, a Russian ballistic missile struck a Danish Refugee Council demining team in the Chernihiv region, killing two workers and injuring three more. Humanitarian demining groups have become direct targets of Russian attacks, making the missions even more dangerous.

The Struggle With Mines

Minefields became the single greatest obstacle to Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive. Russian defenses stretched for miles, forcing sapper teams to crawl on their stomachs at twilight to spot and disarm mines under enemy drone surveillance and artillery fire.

“Mines are usually a problem when soldiers try to push forward, since the Russians mine everything,” says Rima Ziuraitis, a medic in Ukraine’s International Legion. “We see big issues with butterfly mines and toe-poppers – they can take off half a foot, or even an entire one. I’ve treated a few cases like that. Larger mines, of course, cause catastrophic injuries and, in most cases, death.”

Now a young startup called Dropla Tech is making robots to take on the most dangerous jobs. Founded in 2022, it straddles Denmark and Ukraine. Its parent company is registered in Aarhus, its engineering brain trust sits in Dnipro, once a Soviet rocket hub and still home to some of the country’s best engineers.

The spark came not from generals but from forest rangers. Early in the war, Ukraine’s Ministry of Ecology described to Dropla’s founders how mines were devastating forests and wildlife. That conversation convinced Dmytro and his team that their AI expertise could help.

“We realized our expertise in AI could be applied to one of Ukraine’s biggest problems,” says Dmytro Zarubin, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “We can cover nearly all our engineering needs locally.”

A Robot For The Minefields

At the heart of Dropla’s innovation is DroplaLogic, a modular unmanned ground vehicle priced at just €7,000. Designed to be rugged and easily repaired in the field, the platform can carry swappable payloads: a lawn mower module that clears brush so sappers don’t have to cut by hand, and a flail module that detonates anti-personnel mines directly.

Affordability is the breakthrough. Comparable Western systems often cost hundreds of thousands of euros, making widespread deployment unrealistic. “These platforms need to be expendable,” Zarubin told me. “If one is destroyed, it’s far better than losing a soldier.” But hardware alone isn’t enough. Identifying mines at scale requires a new level of intelligence.

Dropla combines aerial drones and computer vision to map suspected minefields. Equipped with five different sensors, the drones feed data into an AI model that color-codes zones from safe to high risk. Accuracy is now around 80%, and improving as the company builds its proprietary dataset of more than one million images.

With the technology maturing, Dropla has started attracting more capital and government attention. In August, the defense startup raised €2.4 million from the Danish Export and Investment Fund, Maj Invest, and Final Frontier to scale its AI-powered demining and drone-detection systems.

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, noted that through BRAVE1 testing and direct soldier feedback, Dropla Tech’s systems “continually learn and become increasingly accurate.” The company is also pushing out battlefield-ready tools designed for everyday use by soldiers.

Dropla also created the Droplet Device – a portable AI unit that attaches to drone controllers, allowing soldiers to detect mines on supply routes in real time. Given that many Ukrainian casualties occur on logistics roads, this tool is already proving useful on the front.

Sappers Will Get Robotic Support

Drone warfare and robotics are also reshaping the dangerous business of mine clearance. Roy Gardiner, an open-source weapons researcher, told me that “drone mounted landmine reconnaissance systems will revolutionize mine clearance for both military and humanitarian applications.”

Traditionally, sappers have had little choice but to crawl through minefields with handheld detectors. According to Gardiner, Dropla’s aerial reconnaissance system changes that equation, giving teams a clearer picture of a field before they ever set foot in it, helping them decide what robotic clearance equipment to deploy.

Remote-operated ground vehicles are already becoming standard to protect sappers’ lives. But the bigger leap will come with autonomy. “AI will tremendously speed up the detection, classification, and mapping process,” Gardiner said, adding that machine learning “will become more and more reliable with every operation.”

The war has turned Ukraine into a laboratory of rapid innovation, where necessity drives new uses of AI and robotics. Those same technologies will be just as important in peacetime, helping rebuild a country that will long be scarred by mines.

(Special thanks to Ryan Van Ert for permission to use his images).