Two Pilot Project activities complete

Two research activities, SPIDER and EuroSWARM, part of the Pilot Project on defence research, have completed successfully, the European Defence Agency (EDA) announced on 23 February.

The Pilot Project aims to explore how the European Union can support the building of defence capabilities relevant for the common security and defence policy and member states. All three projects were launched in November 2016.

The EuroSWARM effort (unmanned heterogeneous swarm of sensor platforms) was focused on testing and demonstrating the efficient and effective operation of unmanned swarm systems in the military arena. Work looked at the minimisation of uncertainties in situational awareness information for surveillance operations through a swarm system of systems composed by static and mobile heterogeneous sensors.

The effort was based around the development of key techniques for adaptive, informative and reconfigurable operations of unmanned heterogeneous swarm systems, such as optimal task allocation and resource management, sensor fusion, cooperative guidance and robust sensor network.

The effort also aimed to integrate the developed techniques, validate the techniques based on empirical simulation studies and demonstrate the proposed solutions in small scale experiments.

The SPIDER effort (inside building awareness and navigation for urban warfare) was aimed at developing an innovative system to support urban-warfare operations by providing improved situational awareness to operational forces entering an unfriendly building. The activity looked at the use of radio frequency stationary sensors and mobile ground robots.

The activity intended to develop and analyse a framework comprising the use of multiple sensors to perform indoor mapping and human detection in an urban warfare context; consider the choice of a data fusion strategy to process and combine sensor data; and explore the advantages and constraints of using each solution as well as solutions encompassing autonomous robots combined with static RF sensor networks.

TRAWA, which aims to contribute to the development of standards for a performant and affordable detect-and-avoid systems usable on UAS, is the last activity of Pilot Project. It is due to be completed by May 2018.