The EU’s external borders have been facing various challenges, such as irregular immigration, smuggling activities and illegal fishing among others. These illicit activities, often involve cross-border actors and represent a real threat to the security and safety in the maritime domain. In addition, law enforcing agencies in charge of border and maritime safety and security are faced with increasing number of unpredictable and complex situations and threats, limited capabilities for wide area and persistent surveillance (low use of large-endurance uncrewed assets), limitations in the ability to collect and share timely available data among institutional organizations, as well as a lack of assets by the relevant authorities to cover the wide maritime areas under their mandate.
Recent years have seen a tremendous increase in production and use of uncrewed systems. Specially the added value these systems can offer to maritime security authorities has been demonstrated in various EU projects. In this context, uncrewed systems provide a promising solution to the challenges in the maritime security domain. Combination of aerial, surface or underwater uncrewed systems offer extensive and cost-effective wide area surveillance capabilities. With the increasing endurance capabilities of the uncrewed systems and payload capacity equipped with advanced sensors (e.g., Radar, EO/IR) and real-time communications tools, large areas can indeed be monitored. The ability to operate these systems autonomously for long periods is a major asset for detecting and tracking, classification and identification of suspicious activities. In addition, these systems can also be utilized for gathering intelligence, providing decision support capabilities and optimizing the use of available resources.
In order to address these challenges, I-SEAMORE project aims to combine the existing maritime coastal surveillance systems with innovative and seamless coordination uncrewed systems to achieve greater coverage, improve situation awareness and increase reaction times. The I-SEAMORE solution contains a holistic layered approach utilizing satellite data collection, remotely operated aerial systems, autonomous surface vehicles combined with existing coastal surveillance systems.
The I-SEAMORE solution provides end-users with a platform the enables various maritime security tasks such as wide area maritime border and coastal monitoring, analysis of potential threats, support to search and rescue operations and detection of illegal activities. These capabilities are achieved through four main pillars:
1) mission planning and execution for heterogenous long-endurance uncrewed systems;
2) exploitation of heterogeneous data sources though uncrewed payload data combined with satellite data;
3) provision of a common operational picture through Innovative data fusion services based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data Analysis, for optimal decision making;
4) interoperability both within the I-SEAMORE services and tools and wit currently existing coastal surveillance systems.
I-SEAMORE project aims to validate the developed innovative solution in a relevant environment through operational trials. A dedicated demonstration campaign will be carried out from a Maritime Operations Centre (MOC) in Troia. The I-SEAMORE solution will be installed in the MOC and will provide the involved end-users with a maritime operational picture through use of heterogenous data and information fusion. The uncrewed systems will be tasked from the MOC using I-SEAMORE mission planning and carry out wide area surveillance mission. As a result, the demonstration will show the added value of I-SEAMORE solution for end users in terms of improved situation awareness, ability to monitor wide area, detect and react to illegal activities and threats earlier.