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SURVEIRON: Advanced surveillance system for the protection of urban soft targets and urban critical infrastructures

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SURVEIRON (SURVEIRON: Advanced surveillance system for the protection of urban soft targets and urban critical infrastructures)

Reporting period: 2017-03-01 to 2018-02-28

SURVEIRON is a drone-based information system aimed to manage critical situations. This system is able to detect and analyse risks in urban settings and automatically recommend security managers the decisions to be made, as quickly as possible to neutralise those risks. SURVEIRON is divided into two well-differentiated subsystems:

* SUBSYSTEM 1 - DRONE FLEET: It is a set of drones which, in case of emergency, will fly automatically to the affected area and gather all the available information.

* SUBSYSTEM 2 - CONTROL CENTRE. It is a centralised system where drones send the information and from which the affected area can be monitored. In this control centre, all the information of the area is summarized, detecting automatically different hazards (fires, cracks, people, smoke, radioactivity and toxic gases), assessing their magnitude and allowing the persons in charge to make decisions to have the best information available.

The management of critical situations in urban settings has recently become especially relevant within the European Union. For this reason, critical infrastructure protection has become a big challenge for the UE and also globally. SURVEIRON is a solution aimed to manage critical situations in urban settings quickly and to help to solve a serious problem that endangers the freedom and security of European citizens. In a worldwide dimension, SURVEIRON will also help to solve social problems of great importance.

The general objective of SURVEIRON is to validate and prepare for commercialization, over a period of two years, a prototype of an innovative surveillance system based on drone fleets. In order to access the market successfully, the prototype will fulfil the operational, practical, legal, economic and technical feasibility requirements. The expected outcome of the project will be the introduction of a new product and several associated disruptive surveillance services in the market. The value proposition of this product and services are not related to drone technology. The detected need, which SURVEIRON fulfils, is its capability to automatically analyse the environment and to propose different courses of action to be taken in a quick, easy, safe and affordable way to help human decision makers in their tasks. This is done with innovative analysis and decision tools technologies, already developed and tested by AEORUM. Furthermore, several improvements will be included in the drone fleet in charge of acquiring the data in order to assure the operative safety. SURVEIRON will be commercialised as a security solution on an international level through a breaking-ground innovative strategy. Its value proposition is based on 5 factors: technology merit, experienced team, powerful partnerships, business potential and attractive solutions.
Several works have been performed during the first months on the development of SURVEIRON, basically in these areas:

- Legislation and regulations adaptations for main markets
- On-board systems
- Sensors
- Parametrizations and software requirements
- Personal Privacy Analysis
- Security Resilience Analysis

The main results obtained in these areas are:

- Legislation: A comprehensive analysis of the current legislation on the main markets have been performed. Analysis of the legal implications found with respect to the technology and methodologies used in the project. The methodology for this study was based on the collection and analysis of public information and available data on a number of issues including Critical Infrastructure Protection, Data Protection, Privacy, UAV and Radio Spectrum.
- On-board system: A full analysis of the system user inside each drone. Tests of performance and power consumption.
- Sensors: Comprehensive analysis of the sensors included in the drone fleet. Analysis of the results obtained with them, as well as their operative conditions and capabilities. Integration with the electronics of the system.
- Parametrizations and software requirements: Integration of the drone fleet in a command centre application able to access each drone, read all the sensors, provide all the telemetry information and control each drone.
- Personal privacy analysis: Analysis of the tasks and measures to be taken into account during the development of the project in terms of assuring the privacy of the people involved in the operations
- Security resilience analysis: Analysis of the security measures implemented to assure the resilience of the system against the misuse of the technologies developed.
The advances beyond the state of the art are:

- Integration of wide number of sensors inside the drone prototype.
- Development of an scalable architecture able to manage the fleet of drones and all the information generated by the system.
- Integration of the whole fleet in the command centre application.
- Performing of autonomous tasks for people search, fire perimeter surveillance and gas maps generation (tested with radioactivity sensors)

The expected potential impact is the standarization of the means for controlling a set of heterogeneus robots in an operational environment, in which they all perform tasks autonomously and send all the information to the central command centre for its analysis.
Command centre main console
Surveiron operative test
Surveiron command centre main application