Our history

Coming from the Saint-Imier valley and an engineer by training, Frédéric Guerne is the founder and CEO of the Digger Foundation. In 1996 he was hired by Jean-Daniel Nicoud, at that time professor of micro-computing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), to lead a research project on the detection of anti-personnel mines. He tested the technology developed in Croatia and Cambodia, where he became aware of the extent of the humanitarian disaster caused by these weapons.

In 1998, the project at EPFL comes to an end. Frédéric Guerne returns to work in the industrial sector but continues to develop mine detectors in his spare time in his cellar.

Meeting Michel Diot, co-founder of a demining organisation then changed the course of his research: instead of detection devices, it became clear to him that deminers needed a machine capable of clearing minefields and preparing the ground before their intervention.

Frédéric Guerne brought volunteers together for this new project. They founded the Digger DTR association and together built the first remote-controlled, armoured clearing machine. The work started in the shed of a local farm, then in a factory garage and finally since 2003 has been housed in the old arms factory at Tavannes.

Over time, the machine evolved to increasingly meet the needs of deminers. Instead of focusing solely on mine clearance, later models have been designed to also plough up the soil and crush mines directly. They are in use in the Balkans and in Africa, where they contribute to increasing the safety and efficiency of demining operations. In 2004, the association became a non-profit humanitarian organisation, the Digger Foundation.

Since then, Digger Foundation demining machines have been used by the major NGOs for demining projects in the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Besides demining machines, the Digger Foundation has also developed the SMART harness for dogs, assisting deminers in searching for mines, and the SCRAPER universal remote control system for construction machines.

• 1997: Adoption of the International Convention on the Prohibition of Anti-Personnel Mines (Ottawa Treaty)
• 1998: Establishment of the Digger DTR organisation
• 2004: Establishment of the Digger Foundation
• 2009: Demining machine financed by the Lower Austrian Red Cross with the support of schoolchildren from all over the country is presented to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
• 2011: The Digger Foundation organises and carries out demining of an important region of Ouadi Doum in northern Chad, on the site of a former military base.
• 2015: Mozambique is the first country in the world to be declared “free of any known mines”, thanks in part to the hundreds of thousands of square meters cleared of mines by a Digger Foundation machine that has been working there since 2012.
• 2016: The demining of the Huambo province in Angola is nearing completion, thanks in part to a Digger Foundation machine.
• 2019: Deployment of a Digger demining machine and SMART harnesses for dogs in Cambodia
• 2021: Deployment of SMART harnesses in South Sudan

All in all, since 1998 Digger Foundation machines have been used in 16 different countries.