Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NESTOR (aN Enhanced pre-frontier intelligence picture to Safeguard The EurOpean boRders)
Reporting period: 2021-11-01 to 2023-04-30
The European Community has faced various challenges in recent years due to the increase in irregular migration flows and transnational crimes, particularly smuggling activity in the Eastern EU Borders. This has led to the need for a next-generation holistic border surveillance system that provides pre-frontier situational awareness to assist the relevant authorities in making more informed decisions about border control and response operations. NESTOR aims to address these challenges by demonstrating a fully functional border surveillance system.
Objectives & Methodology:
NESTOR's objective is to develop a next-generation holistic border surveillance system that will provide long-range and wide area surveillance capabilities for detection, recognition, classification, and tracking of moving targets, based on optical, thermal imaging, and RF spectrum analysis technologies. This achieved by creating an interoperable sensor network, including stationary installations and mobile manned or unmanned vehicles (aerial, ground, water, underwater) capable of functioning both as standalone, tethered, and in swarms. Furthermore, NESTOR's system fuses in real-time border surveillance data combined with web and social media information, creating and sharing a pre-frontier intelligent picture to local, regional, and national command centers in AR environment being interoperable with CISE and EUROSUR.
Objectives & Methodology:
NESTOR's objective is to develop a next-generation holistic border surveillance system that will provide long-range and wide area surveillance capabilities for detection, recognition, classification, and tracking of moving targets, based on optical, thermal imaging, and RF spectrum analysis technologies. This achieved by creating an interoperable sensor network, including stationary installations and mobile manned or unmanned vehicles (aerial, ground, water, underwater) capable of functioning both as standalone, tethered, and in swarms. Furthermore, NESTOR's system fuses in real-time border surveillance data combined with web and social media information, creating and sharing a pre-frontier intelligent picture to local, regional, and national command centers in AR environment being interoperable with CISE and EUROSUR.
NESTOR established a fully functional, next generation, holistic and deployable Border Surveillance System providing pre-frontier situational awareness beyond maritime and land border, capable of detecting, assessing and efficiently responding to illegal activities while following the concept of the European Integrated Border Management.
NESTOR will aim at exploiting existing solutions that could significantly assist the end-users' daily operational activities and mitigate any risk that is involved in their operations, expanding with cutting edge technologies and innovative solutions. To succeed in the implementation of an holistic operational framework, a number of supplementary technologies have been incorporated enabling the establishment of robust wide coverage communication network between the core command and control center, the individual surveillance sensors and the heterogeneous robotic platforms. On top of this, detection and tracking capabilities for early identification of illegal activities has been developed and integrated. This information can be forwarded to a command, control and coordination system 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.
Under this scope, during the lifecycle of the project, the below objectives have been achieved:
◙Enhanced sensing and robotic technologies for border surveillance
◙Advances on situation awareness for border surveillance
◙Platform development and all legacy systems integration
◙User-oriented Objectives and Activities, including the user requirements and operational scenarios definition, as well as the preparation and implementation of Trials
◙End user evaluation after each Trial demonstration, and training of all components to the end-users before the Trials' implementation.
◙Impact-Making Objectives and Activities
◙Dissemination, Collaboration, and Standardization activities,
as analytically reported in the Final Technical Report - Part B.
NESTOR will aim at exploiting existing solutions that could significantly assist the end-users' daily operational activities and mitigate any risk that is involved in their operations, expanding with cutting edge technologies and innovative solutions. To succeed in the implementation of an holistic operational framework, a number of supplementary technologies have been incorporated enabling the establishment of robust wide coverage communication network between the core command and control center, the individual surveillance sensors and the heterogeneous robotic platforms. On top of this, detection and tracking capabilities for early identification of illegal activities has been developed and integrated. This information can be forwarded to a command, control and coordination system 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.
Under this scope, during the lifecycle of the project, the below objectives have been achieved:
◙Enhanced sensing and robotic technologies for border surveillance
◙Advances on situation awareness for border surveillance
◙Platform development and all legacy systems integration
◙User-oriented Objectives and Activities, including the user requirements and operational scenarios definition, as well as the preparation and implementation of Trials
◙End user evaluation after each Trial demonstration, and training of all components to the end-users before the Trials' implementation.
◙Impact-Making Objectives and Activities
◙Dissemination, Collaboration, and Standardization activities,
as analytically reported in the Final Technical Report - Part B.
NESTOR’s Architecture identified the component responsible for implementing methods, Algorithms and Solutions for smooth and interoperable operation or the several components, sensors and devices with the Use of Cutting-Edge technologies (AI, Unmanned mobile robots, AR, Radio signal identification) for border surveillance.
Data sources and existing involved systems identified different interfaces and system’s boundaries. The definition of the architecture represented methods and tools for time-awareness, fault, and attack tolerance, monitoring for failure and attack detection, visual design tools for system modeling and fast prototyping.
The Sensors Definition was aiming to the definition and design of sensing elements and the corresponding subsystems, including latest hardware specifications of the selected sensors in a wireless, stand-alone and modular system, along with proper software integration, in order to build a decent project platform, including the development or implementation of proper communication protocol and energy requirement, study for adequate standalone operation. The design and integration of novel sensors allowed NESTOR sensing platform system to progress from TRL 3-4 towards to reach TRL 7-8 at the end of the project.
The Integration of communication services at component level was responsible for interconnecting the various NESTOR devices. It developed all modules relevant to the communication and reliable data exchange, by implementing mechanisms for the data aggregation and homogenization, based on a uniform NESTOR semantic vocabulary, through the implementation of Common Data Management Environment.
The Long-range communications implemented the core base of the communication interconnection of NESTOR at the border sites, by introducing the NESTOR Gateway that acted as the local communication hub offering secure interconnections to the locally deployed tactical assets, facilitating the secure data exchange amongst these assets and the C2 deployed.
The Interoperability layer and legacy systems connection designed and developed the interoperability layer in the form of a Data Flow engine, supporting powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing transformation, and system mediation logic. It allowed seamless integration and interoperability capabilities of the various NESTOR assets by supporting different data formats, communication protocols and data exchange mechanisms, providing at the same time the required adaptation layer for CISE/EUROSUR interconnection.
As a conclusion, the Full system operational testing performed factory integration tests, through different configuration per trial configuration. The integration process considered all NESTOR components developed during the project. The final system deployment was qualified through the test files and validated based on the requirements identified and the system logical decomposition. The System deployment and maintenance in testing environments ensured adequate system deployment, according to each hardware and software systems utilization per trial set. Modular approach was followed as much as possible, in order to facilitate the system’s deployment and maintenance in the most cost-efficient way.
Additionally, achievements from the impact-wise perspective should be stated:
◙Enhance the situational awareness and pre-frontier intelligence at the EU external borders by developing and integrating surveillance technologies and testing and validating them in real international trial scenarios enhancing thus the sense of security and safety of European citizens.
◙Create a reliable, enhanced maritime surveillance and border security interoperability framework to be used in CISE for exchanging data and services among border authorities.
◙Allow for considerable cost-savings, performance improvement and quick adoption of the solution by building the NESTOR system on existing state-of-the-art systems and infrastructures.
Data sources and existing involved systems identified different interfaces and system’s boundaries. The definition of the architecture represented methods and tools for time-awareness, fault, and attack tolerance, monitoring for failure and attack detection, visual design tools for system modeling and fast prototyping.
The Sensors Definition was aiming to the definition and design of sensing elements and the corresponding subsystems, including latest hardware specifications of the selected sensors in a wireless, stand-alone and modular system, along with proper software integration, in order to build a decent project platform, including the development or implementation of proper communication protocol and energy requirement, study for adequate standalone operation. The design and integration of novel sensors allowed NESTOR sensing platform system to progress from TRL 3-4 towards to reach TRL 7-8 at the end of the project.
The Integration of communication services at component level was responsible for interconnecting the various NESTOR devices. It developed all modules relevant to the communication and reliable data exchange, by implementing mechanisms for the data aggregation and homogenization, based on a uniform NESTOR semantic vocabulary, through the implementation of Common Data Management Environment.
The Long-range communications implemented the core base of the communication interconnection of NESTOR at the border sites, by introducing the NESTOR Gateway that acted as the local communication hub offering secure interconnections to the locally deployed tactical assets, facilitating the secure data exchange amongst these assets and the C2 deployed.
The Interoperability layer and legacy systems connection designed and developed the interoperability layer in the form of a Data Flow engine, supporting powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing transformation, and system mediation logic. It allowed seamless integration and interoperability capabilities of the various NESTOR assets by supporting different data formats, communication protocols and data exchange mechanisms, providing at the same time the required adaptation layer for CISE/EUROSUR interconnection.
As a conclusion, the Full system operational testing performed factory integration tests, through different configuration per trial configuration. The integration process considered all NESTOR components developed during the project. The final system deployment was qualified through the test files and validated based on the requirements identified and the system logical decomposition. The System deployment and maintenance in testing environments ensured adequate system deployment, according to each hardware and software systems utilization per trial set. Modular approach was followed as much as possible, in order to facilitate the system’s deployment and maintenance in the most cost-efficient way.
Additionally, achievements from the impact-wise perspective should be stated:
◙Enhance the situational awareness and pre-frontier intelligence at the EU external borders by developing and integrating surveillance technologies and testing and validating them in real international trial scenarios enhancing thus the sense of security and safety of European citizens.
◙Create a reliable, enhanced maritime surveillance and border security interoperability framework to be used in CISE for exchanging data and services among border authorities.
◙Allow for considerable cost-savings, performance improvement and quick adoption of the solution by building the NESTOR system on existing state-of-the-art systems and infrastructures.