The Robots That Walk Into Minefields So People Don't Have To

Some robots are built to dazzle. Others are built so that a human being does not have to take the next step across a field that might kill them. Ukraine, now widely described as the most heavily mined country on Earth, has become the proving ground for the second kind — and the machines crawling through its fields are quietly redefining what robotics is for.

According to figures reported by Euromaidan Press and humanitarian groups, roughly 460,000 hectares of Ukrainian land are still considered contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance — an area larger than many small countries. Clearing it by hand, the traditional way, would take decades and cost deminers their lives. So Ukraine is turning to robots.

One chassis, two jobs

The clearest symbol of this shift is the NEO-1, a domestically built sapper robot that Ukraine's Defence Ministry formally codified for military use this spring. Reported specifications describe a compact 60-kilogram platform that rolls at up to 7 km/h, runs for around eight hours on a charge, and is controlled from up to 500 metres away — extendable, in some configurations, to three kilometres. Its real trick is versatility: the same chassis that hunts mines with a multi-channel metal detector can, hours later, haul 70 kilograms of cargo to the front or tow a loaded cart.

That metal detector matters more than it sounds. A battlefield is littered with shrapnel, wire and shell casings, and a system that flags every fragment is useless. NEO-1's onboard filtering algorithms are designed to suppress that noise and reduce false positives — letting the robot, not a person, make the first nervous approach.

AI eyes in the sky — with limits

Detection is increasingly an aerial job. The HALO Trust, one of the world's largest demining organisations, has trained AI to recognise mines and explosive debris from high-resolution drone imagery, reportedly reaching around 70% accuracy with support from cloud partners. By the summer of 2025, HALO said it had cleared more than 8.3 million square metres of Ukrainian land, much of it farmland a country at war cannot afford to lose.

It would be tidy to say the machines have taken over. They haven't. As reported in defence coverage this year, fully autonomous clearance remains out of reach: soil moisture, vegetation and the depth at which a mine is buried still defeat the algorithms, and a human deminer makes the final call. Ukraine plans to contract more than 25,000 ground robotic systems in the first half of 2026 alone — double all of last year — but the goal is not to remove people from the loop. It is to keep them alive long enough to finish a job that may outlast the war itself.