Advanced military internet of things

After three years of research, four partners from Sweden, Estonia and the Netherlands completed their European Defence Agency Project IN4STARS. The main goal of the project was to develop and demonstrate technology that enables situational awareness based on the fusion of large amounts of complex information obtained from diverse sources.

Partners

Thales coordinated the project. Gregor Pavlin - who works for Thales in Delft – explains us why this project is important. Gregor: “We worked on this project with four partners: The Technical University of Estonia, The Swedish Defence Research Agency FOI, TU Eindhoven and Thales. All partners have their own assts, for example UAV’s, sensors, databases and analysts with different information. In case of military peacekeeping missions you want to combine all the information to get enhanced situation awareness. If you combine all the information, you can reach continuous intelligence about potential threats. It’s some sort of advanced military internet of things supporting advanced surveillance and solutions.”

Eyes & ears – sensors & people

A use case was conducted. A sergeant has to escort some NGOs through an unsafe area. As they are travelling the sergeant receives alerts on a tablet. These alerts contain high-quality intelligence reports based on various ‘signals’ from the environment (data from sensors in the environment, soldiers, intelligence operatives). If there’s any chance of getting in trouble, he changes his route. Gregor: “The major point of this study is that you can collect information, but you also need some ‘brain’ to get sensible situation awareness out of it. All assets can see something, but they’re silos, you need to make assets interoperable and combine them with the right algorithms and analytics. Also, you have to take into account changing environments and adapt the surveillance solutions to the missions and newly available assets. For the IN4STARS project we developed the basis to make such solutions possible.”

IN4STARS has a unique position in the European Defence Agency because it is the only project that systematically makes connections between sensor networks, data fusion/automated analysis, information management, interoperability and data security. Gregor: “We reached our goal for now and the most important thing is: it’s not over. We automatically became part of a new EDA project as the Dutch Ministry of Defence wants to continue investing in this topic.”

Purple Nectar

This week (8 and 9 November) IN4STARS will be demonstrated at the Purple Nectar event. Purple Nectar is an experiments- and demonstration environment, organized by the Dutch military, with the objective to show decision makers and end users the possibilities of innovative solutions. Gregor: “We will give an advanced demonstration, including also Thales products. We will extend our scenario with SQUIRE radars, the SOTAS vehicle communication systems and the MOOVE app.”