Young Georgians create drone to reduce landmine casualties

A team of Georgian school students have come up with a revolutionary way to safely clear landmines without risking human lives.

Motivated by stark figures that showed one person died every 19 minutes from a landmine, teenage siblings Karlo and Ana Khutsishvili worked with their cousin Tornike Mazmishvili to create Life Saver - a remotely operated drone that cleared planted explosives.

Karlo Khutsishvili - an 11th Grade student at Tbilisi's Number 199 School (more commonly known as the Komarov School) - told Maestro TV the team were inspired to find a way to clear mines after learning about the high daily death toll caused by mine explosions.

The TV program also featured his sister Ana Khutsishvili – a 12th Grade student at Public School Number 1 in the southern Georgian city Akhaltsikhe.

The young female inventor also added the trio were motivated to do something after learning that land mines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were the leading cause of death of Georgian Armed Forces' service members serving in international peacekeeping missions.

Karlo Khutsishvili and his sister Ana were two of the three-member team that invented 'Life Saver'. Screenshot from video by Maestro TV.

Assembled with the group's own expenses, Life Saver was operated from an iPad device using touchscreen interface.

The drone could be remotely sent for a "sweep" over a wide area of suspected mine fields.

Users were able to fly the drone or drive it to its destination, as it had wings and wheels. The device possessed the ability to overcome or avoid obstacles by folding its wings and deploying tracks in places where its wheels failed to navigate.

Its inventors said Life Saver had already been tested in mine detection and clearing against chemicals commonly used in explosives.

Further tests in field conditions were expected to follow, with the inventors now teaming up with DELTA, Georgia's State Military Scientific Centre, to continue developing the prototype.

Looking ahead the invention was set to feature in an international contest where inventors presented their creations in search of financing to turn their ideas into full-blown projects.

Young Georgian inventors Karlo Khutsishvili (L) and Irakli Kapanadze with personnel at the NASA Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, the United States in 2015.

Life Saver was not Karlo Khutsishvili's first invention.

The tech-savvy young creator won the 2015 Millennium Innovations Award with co-creator Irakli Kapanadze for a device designed to assist farmers to more accurately predict weather forecasts.

The two inventors were invited to present their device at the annual innovation summit at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, the United States last year.