As part of the NATO Science, Peace and Security (SPS) Programme, NATO hosted a project demonstration event showcasing two of its funded initiatives that focus on uncrewed and autonomous systems – first, final competition of the SAPIENCE project and, second, a demonstration from MinesEye.
The SAPIENCE project aims to advance autonomous systems by using artificial intelligence to improve perception and guidance in Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) or drones. As part of the project, university teams from Austria, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States addressed a series of technical challenges identified by the NATO Joint Capability Group on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (JCGUAS) in search and rescue operations, focusing their competition efforts on disaster-response scenarios. The project aims to enable multiple drones to navigate and map GNSS-denied environments, detect victims, deliver aid and carry out complex cooperative tasks without direct piloting.
The event also featured demonstrations of another SPS-funded project MinesEye, which combines advanced sensors and artificial intelligence to help identify mines and unexploded ordnance in Ukraine.
SHOTLIST
(00:00) VARIOUS SHOTS – UNIVERSITY PARTICIPANTS MAINTAIN AND PREPARE THEIR DRONES.
(00:27) VARIOUS CLOSE-UPS – STUDENT-DESIGNED DRONES READY FOR TAKE-OFF.
(00:42) VARIOUS SHOTS – STUDENT-DESIGNED DRONES FLY AUTONOMOUSLY DURING A SEARCH AND RESCUE DEMONSTRATION.
(01:08) VARIOUS SHOTS – UNIVERSITY PARTICIPANTS MAINTAIN AND ADJUST THEIR DRONES.
(01:30) VARIOUS SHOTS – STUDENT-DESIGNED DRONES IN FLIGHT.
(01:45) VARIOUS SHOTS – MULTIPLE STUDENT-DESIGNED DRONES FLYING DURING THE DEMONSTRATION.
(01:56) VARIOUS SHOTS – MINESEYE DEMINING DRONE, DEVELOPED BY THE POSTUP FOUNDATION, PREPARES FOR TAKE-OFF.
(02:00) MEDIUM SHOT – MINESEYE DEMINING DRONE TAKES OFF.
(02:11) MEDIUM SHOT – MINESEYE DEMINING DRONE SCANS THE AREA FOR MINES DURING THE DEMONSTRATION.
(02:41) MEDIUM SHOT – MINESEYE DEMINING DRONE LANDS.
(02:46) SOUNDBITE – VLAD KOZAK, MANAGING DIRECTOR, POSTUP FOUNDATION
“So we are tackling the biggest challenge of landmine contamination in the world, that is in Ukraine, because up to 25% of the territory of Ukraine could be potentially contaminated by landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO). And this is a huge disruption to all operations and people living in these regions.”
(03:05) SOUNDBITE – VLAD KOZAK, MANAGING DIRECTOR, POSTUP FOUNDATION
“We are using drones for aerial mapping with a multi-sensor approach and with AI. So we basically use different types of sensors to detect almost all landmines and the UXO that are on the field, map them precisely on the territory, and then let humanitarian demining operators do their job to clear these objects.”
(03:26) SOUNDBITE – VLAD KOZAK, MANAGING DIRECTOR, POSTUP FOUNDATION
“NATO SPS project helped us to bring our early proof of concept to work in a prototype at a high technology readiness level that we started to deploy in Ukraine quickly with the State Emergency Service.”
(03:38) SOUNDBITE – VLAD KOZAK, MANAGING DIRECTOR, POSTUP FOUNDATION
“So in 30 months, we managed to go from the prototype that was tested only in a lab environment to real-world testing and to large-scale real-world deployment, and also to understanding what should be the concept of operations with such systems, with real operations of humanitarian demining operators in Ukraine.”
(03:58) SOUNDBITE – VLAD KOZAK, MANAGING DIRECTOR, POSTUP FOUNDATION
“So we expect to scale this up. We are working on training curricula and on building more systems for the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, and we expect that they will be using such systems in non-technical and technical surveys before clearance operations begin.”
(04:14) SOUNDBITE – VLAD KOZAK, MANAGING DIRECTOR, POSTUP FOUNDATION
“So in our NATO SPS project, we cooperate with five institutions, three from Poland and two from Ukraine. And those institutions help us to advance sensor data processing techniques, like the Institute of Geophysics in Ukraine, or also improve our drone topics or land drone topics that we also use in our research.”
(04:34) SOUNDBITE – VLAD KOZAK, MANAGING DIRECTOR, POSTUP FOUNDATION
“Our lesson learned from Ukraine when deploying the system is that the end-user customer needs something that works really well, not necessarily the most advanced system that has all the technologies embedded, but really the one that can reliably operate and is easy to use. Those are very important points.”
(04:52) SOUNDBITE – VLAD KOZAK, MANAGING DIRECTOR, POSTUP FOUNDATION
“The impact of our project is that we aim to help people to come back to their daily lives when territories are being cleared.”
(05:01) SOUNDBITE – VLAD KOZAK, MANAGING DIRECTOR, POSTUP FOUNDATION
“From the operator's point of view, from the sapper's point of view, we help them to minimise the risks of entering fields that are potentially contaminated and do surveys by orders of magnitude faster, because drones can survey much more territory than manually.”
(05:17) SOUNDBITE – ABDULLA TAMMAM, RESEARCHER, CITY ST GEORGE'S, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
“Here today, we're testing our solutions for drones for search and rescue. So we're using cooperative drones, a fleet of drones, to complete search and rescue tasks.”
(05:29) SOUNDBITE – ABDULLA TAMMAM, RESEARCHER, CITY ST GEORGE'S, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
“The main problem we've identified in this space and using drones for search and rescue is having them all communicate as a team, having the drones cooperate even when one drone goes out of communication range or isn't able to be operated, having the rest of them continue and continue the task. That's been a real challenge that we've faced, but we're able to solve it by the end, which has been excellent.”
(05:53) SOUNDBITE – ABDULLA TAMMAM, RESEARCHER, CITY ST GEORGE'S, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
“The real-world impact of our drones, of our platforms, is that they'll be able to provide much more rapid response in emergency situations where GPS might be knocked out, or where it's unsafe for humans to go. Drones can be the first responders and report back to the team on the ground, so they can more effectively help people in need and deliver aid as needed.”
(06:15) SOUNDBITE – ABDULLA TAMMAM, RESEARCHER, CITY ST GEORGE'S, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
“Working with different universities throughout the three years of the competition has been really beneficial. Each university, each team, approaches the competition in a different way, and we learn a lot from each other. Even though we're constrained to the same set of hardware, we all come to it at very different angles. So we've learned how to use hardware in different ways, how we construct a solution in different ways, and how we approach problems live in the competition in different ways.”
(06:41) SOUNDBITE – ABDULLA TAMMAM, RESEARCHER, CITY ST GEORGE'S, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
“The NATO SPS initiative gained a lot from this competition, really. At least from my perspective, getting new, fresh ideas from students on resilience and different ways to deal with it can be really useful and applied to many other fields, not just drones, any type of autonomous robotic platforms. Each team approached the resilience angle in a different way, and some more successfully than others and in different scenarios. You might want to use different types of solutions, so it's great to have that wealth of information that they can tap into whenever they need.”
(07:09) SOUNDBITE – NABIL AOUF, PROFESSOR OF AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS, CITY ST GEORGE'S, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
“Especially in this competition, we were able to fly in a full GPS-denied environment without actually having access to GPS. So that's actually already an amazing development that NATO can learn from through the development that we do. And obviously what we try to do is maybe take this development further. Now actually we are talking a low-level Technology Readiness Level (TRL), so up to four. We can go to a higher-level TRL, but even actually thinking about ideas of spinout technology that has been spinning out the technologies, so it can help actually to get the industrial framework for NATO that it can rely on for future development.”
(07:55) SOUNDBITE – PIERS CAZALET, DIRECTOR, DEFENCE AND SECURITY COOPERATION, NATO HEADQUARTERS
“It's great that we're here today. We're seeing how SPS has been able to work with academics and students, research institutes over the last few years to develop some really, really impressive capabilities, looking at innovation, looking at unmanned systems, autonomous systems, the use of AI in really practical ways that can make a substantial difference to us NATO Allies, but also to partners as well.”
(08:22) SOUNDBITE – PIERS CAZALET, DIRECTOR, DEFENCE AND SECURITY COOPERATION, NATO HEADQUARTERS
“We're looking at crisis response, working together on humanitarian response here. For example, we've seen some examples of the use of these autonomous systems in demining. This is going to be incredibly important for the future.”
(08:35) SOUNDBITE – PIERS CAZALET, DIRECTOR, DEFENCE AND SECURITY COOPERATION, NATO HEADQUARTERS
“And our SPS program does a huge amount of work with Ukraine. Around a third, just over a third, of all the research projects we have are with Ukraine. Ukraine is an innovative nation. This is not about supporting Ukraine. It's about us learning from Ukraine.”
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