Preliminary Response of Transient Electromagnetic Survey System for Buried Metal Detection from Aerial Platform

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are being used for surveillance, inspection, transportation, and even in military applications for landmine detection and demining, however, their low weight-carrying capacities limit their capability in this respect. To deal with the problem, a miniaturized airborne transient electromagnetic (TEM) system is designed for metal detection which doesn’t require the sweeping motion required in the case of the conventional frequency domain metal detectors. The general airborne TEM systems map variation of ground conductivity using an aircraft or helicopter equipped with a central loop TEM underslung sensor. In terms of detection, the proposed low-flying aerial sensing system is more effective than a ground-based TEM system for precise localization of metallic objects and remote maneuverability of the survey operation without involving human life in danger. In this study, the lightweight hardware implementation of the proposed TEM system is discussed and preliminary detection capabilities are presented while the experimentation mimics a straight flight patch of a low-flying drone. The proposed signal processing scheme is applied in real-time on the field test signals which demonstrates that the designed system can effectively differentiate a metallic object from non-metallic soil background.