ROBORDER - Autonomous swarm of heterogenous robots for border surveillance (H2020-SEC-20-BES-2016, 2017-2020)

Border authorities and Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) across Europe face important challenges in how they patrol and protect the borders. Their work becomes more problematic considering the heterogeneity of threats, the wideness of the surveyed area, the adverse weather conditions and the wide range of terrains. Towards delivering a solution including all such factors, the main goal of ROBORDER is to develop and demonstrate a fully-functional autonomous border surveillance system with unmanned mobile robots including aerial, water surface, underwater and ground vehicles which will incorporate multimodal sensors as part of an interoperable network. Our intention is to implement a heterogenous robot system and enhance it with detection capabilities for early identification of criminal activities at border and coastal areas along with marine pollution events.

The system will be equipped with adaptable sensing and robotic technologies that can operate in a wide range of operational and environmental settings. To provide a complete and detailed situational awareness picture that supports highly efficient operations, the network of sensors will include enhanced static networked sensors such as border surveillance radars, as well as mobile sensors customised and installed on the vehicles. These will include: (i) passive radars that can extend the capabilities of the existing border surveillance radars, (ii) passive RF-signal sensing devices to intercept emission sources that are present in area, enrich the overall situational awareness picture with this information, allowing for further characterizing the nature and behaviour of entities in the picture, and detecting unauthorized signal sources and (iii) other mobile sensors like thermal cameras (infra-red), optical cameras and more . To succeed in the implementation of an operational solution, a number of supplementary technologies will also be applied enabling the establishment of robust communication links between the command and control unit and the heterogeneous robots. On top of this, detection capabilities for early identification of criminal activities and hazardous incidents will be developed. This information will be forwarded to the command and control unit that will enable the integration of large volumes of heterogeneous sensor data and the provision of a quick overview of the situation at a glance to the operators, supporting them in their decisions.