As its surroundings changes radically and climate conditions deteriorates, Europe and its Members adapt to these current challenges. To this end and in order to maximise their usability, the EC established a framework of a common policy (EU Security Market study) by categorizing potential technologies per security domain, including Critical Infrastructure (CI) Protection. This trend is indicative for the importance and significancy that the EC gives to these matters. Any potential disruption, either intentional as a terrorist attack or a natural disaster, may risk smooth operations of such structures that may have a severe impact on a local society and its daily activities or well-being. Current advancements in various technologies can be particularly beneficial in CI protection especially when they can provide a timely support without the necessity of a human in the loop.

TESTUDO, aligned with the need of a holistic and autonomous security approach in CI protection domain and with the European Commission’s objectives, will utilize advanced unmanned vehicles along with existing equipment to deliver a highly mature platform for continuous monitoring even at harsh environments and remote territories. Tailored to the needs of the domain and targeting to maximize the platform’s autonomy capabilities, TESTUDO intends to incorporate state-of-the-art technologies for detection, prevention and prediction increasing their cognitive capabilities for different types of hazardous events. In addition, optimization techniques will identify the resources needed for the execution of high-level missions contributing to the total autonomy of the deployable system. A multidisciplinary group of technical innovators for AI-based models, CBRN, cyber-security detection, Digital twins and XAI along with the CI-related experts will collaborate to deliver an innovative action and solution to protect various CIs during a long operational period and completely autonomously. Every prototype will be thoroughly validated under real world situations/conditions within the scope of large scale demonstrators.

MKLab is responsible for the coordination and scientific management of the TESTUDO project and has a critical role in the project by leading two technical WPs on Artificial cognitive intelligence for threat identification. The objectives of these WPs are focusing on the detection of various objects, events and attributes: (i) visual and multispectral object detections including executed on embedded platforms, (ii) activity recognition via visual streams, (iii) CBRN detections and, (iv) cyber-threat identification. Within these activities, MKlab leads the development of two key services, namely multispectral detections of specific objects and prediction models via Digital Twins for CI early protection.