As an application of mechatronics, this paper presents the advances in surface-adaptive ground penetrating radar (GPR)-based anti-personnel landmine detection project in Nagoya University. These advances can be summarized in three items: (1) GPR manipulation where a low-pressure-tire vehicle capable of moving inside a mine field, to facilitate machine-based sensing in place of manual sensing, is applied; (2) enhancement of underground landmine suspects' images through geography adaptive scanning and measurements signal processing of a vector frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) GPR; (3) GPR fusion with metal detector (MD) for automatic decision making through experimental-based fuzzy learnt fusion rules. The state-of-art of these advances as well as directions for future research work is to be presented. (C) 2009 The Franklin Institute. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.