NESTOR

NESTOR – aN Enhanced pre-frontier intelligence picture to Safeguard The EurOpean boRders

NESTOR aims to demonstrate a fully functional next generation holistic border surveillance system providing pre-frontier situational awareness beyond maritime and land border following the concept of the European Integrated Border Management. NESTOR long-range, wide area surveillance capabilities for detection, recognition classification and tracking of moving targets (e.g. persons, vehicles, drones etc.) is based on optical, thermal imagine and Radio Frequency (RF) spectrum analysis fed by an interoperable long range IP-based network of sensors including stationary installations and mobile manned or unmanned aerial, water surface, underwater and ground vehicles, capable of functioning both as standalone, tethered and in swarms (UAV, USV, UUV and UGV) platforms. NESTOR Border Command Control and Coordination intelligence (BC3i) system using cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence and Risk Assessment technologies fuses in real-time the surveillance data in combination with analysis of web and social media data, sharing a pre-frontier intelligent picture to local, regional and national command center operators in AR environment.

Towards motivating the border agencies to capitalize on state-of-the-art technologies, NESTOR will aim at exploiting existing solutions that could significantly assist their 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 will also be 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 will be developed and integrated. This information will 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. NESTOR will validate and demonstrate the applied solutions in real operational scenario trials together with national Law Enforcement Agencies, Border authorities and practitioners to certify the efficiency of the applied solutions in border surveillance tasks. In addition, provisioning compliance with the existing regulatory framework, the performed trials will ensure the application of the proper legislation in the scope of any personal data protection and privacy respect.

CERTH is participating with two (2) complementary research groups: (i) M4D group from MKLab and (ii) ConvCAO. M4D group is responsible for the management and supervision of the scientific and technical outcomes of NESTOR, as well as the development of object recognition models for border surveillance based on optronic data and the development of fusion schemes. ConvCAO group is responsible for the development of UxV swarm commanding tolls and machine collaboration methodologies.