Call: Border Security: autonomous systems and control systems

The primary aims of the Secure Societies Challenge are:

• to enhance the resilience of our society against natural and man-made disasters, ranging from the development of new crisis management tools to communication interoperability, and to develop novel solutions for the protection of critical infrastructure;
• to fight crime and terrorism ranging from new forensic tools to protection against explosives;
• to improve border security, ranging from improved maritime border protection to supply chain security and to support the Union's external security policies including through conflict prevention and peace building;
• and to provide enhanced cyber-security, ranging from secure information sharing to new assurance models

Low levels of situational awareness on the EU borders, high at sea and on unpopulated or scarcely populated land areas, are important factors of cost of border surveillance. This could improve if the different prototypes of unmanned vehicles tested today to perform automatically a very limited set of functions and routines could be transformed into autonomous, long-enduring agents able to operate in complex maritime and land environments.

Current border control systems involve a wide range of heterogeneous assets – manned and unmanned – to survey from air, surface (land and sea) and underwater. Similarly the objects of their surveillance may be vessels, land vehicles, aircrafts, and underwater vehicles used, for instance, for smuggling and trafficking. Only enhanced command and control systems using advanced 3D computer graphics technology may allow to represent accurately the position of surveillance assets – including autonomous agents – and external objects in such complex environments.

At least three legal entities. Each of the three must be established in a different EU Member State or Horizon 2020 associated country. All three legal entities must be independent of each other.

Link to the National Contact Point Finder.