This is something that just boggles the mind. Can people really be inventing this sort of thing, given the complete nightmare that minefields from previous conflicts have proven to third world nations? Clearly they are, as detailed in this article about SAIC’s efforts in this regard.

“The SAIC team is developing a robust intelligent mobile platform that could be used to replace the existing family of scatterable mine antitank landmines. These mobile platforms have the ability to locally recognize and respond to breach attempts, thus collectively serving as a Self-Healing Minefield. ”

The idea is that the mines know about where each other is located, so if one goes off then the others relocate themselves to fill in the hole. Doesn’t that sound like a great idea? How’d like to have one of these in your backyard?

And it sounds like it’s already ready to go: “All major subsystems have been demonstrated, and preparation for a fully integrated experiment employing 10 mine platforms will be completed in early March 2002.”