Collaborative methodology for enhancing sustainability in rural communities and the use of land

The new peace process in Colombia is providing a new lease of life to rural communities but raising many issues and challenges, both social and operational. Lands that were in no-go zones are now available for use but have many issues from direct effect from the war such as land mines to indirect such as debris, pollution and exhaustion. On the other hand, technologisation in agriculture is very limited in those regions. To support the sustainable development of these communities, the main purpose of this project involves the use of multiple sensors to measure the land and help optimise its use. Sensing land characteristic and detecting buried objects is very complex and no one sensor or method can achieve this optimally. With multiple sensors, computational intelligence based data fusion, analysis and decision making techniques we can optimise the performance of various systems. We are currently collaborating with PUJ (Bogota) in optimising a land scanning platform that uses an array of sensors and other data sources. We are using improvised land mine detection as a case study but this will be expanded to other applications for the optimal use of land. Our collaboration will put together PUJ’s links with key rural communities and their sensing robotic platforms, with our CI, optimisation and decision making expertise to enable scaling their capabilities to many applications and large data sets and large expanses of land. More details are available at https://sites.google.com/site/facaraff/research/gcrf18