Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and landmines are a significant threat to military personnel, civilians and equipment, and a major cause of casualties for European forces during operations. Countering these hidden threats is essential to protect soldiers, reduce loss of equipment, secure critical logistic activities, improve mobility and freedom to act by increasing the security of operation areas, and more generally enhance operational efficiency.
-Technological solutions to detect and characterise IEDs and landmines in complex environments, using a combination of advanced sensors, information fusion from these sensors, and unmanned ground and aerial systems to extend the detection capabilities.
-Should include clear descriptions of criteria to assess work package completion. Criteria should include the participation to the test campaigns organised in the framework of the technological challenge, the delivery of sensor data collected during the field tests, and the delivery of descriptions of the systems submitted to the tests.
-Physics-based sensors enhancement
-Collection of representative data, combined with various artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, e.g., computer vision for object detection and localisation
-Use of various sensors borne by a fleet of unmanned ground and aerial systems, combined with information fusion techniques
-Better exploitation of limited amounts of data and use of models that are easier to adapt to new environments (through innovative AI techniques such as learning methods requiring less supervision from expert developers, transfer learning…)
-Multidisciplinary cooperation between the hardware sensors and AI communities.
