The main goal of this study, carried out by the author on behalf of the Swiss Defence Procurement Agency (DPA), was to characterise existing technologies, and identify corresponding commercially available systems, for the direct detection of explosives for Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) tasks. Systems should be able to determine if a given piece of munition contains explosives or is inert, and ideally in the former case to establish the type of explosive (see also Annex A2.1). This will be often referred to in the following as the “task at hand”, or the “task of interest to us”. Note that the object in questions has already been detected by other means (usually visually, e.g. lying on the surface) – what is needed is the capacity to characterise its contents (explosive or inert)
