uav surveillance

SHIELD - Safeguard Heritage In Endangered Looted Districts 

SHIELD aims to bring public authorities and police corps a step further using an autonomous, flexible, sustainable and scalable, aerial surveillance system in order to identify in real-time illegal excavation and enable LEAs to take proper actions.

Goal is to design and build an artificially intelligent Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) to patrol archaeological and heritage sites using the latest technologies in imaging techniques, live data streaming, in-flight processing, decentralized (on-board) processing, machine learning, and flight data management. The customized surveillance device is expected to be autonomously deployed from a ground station (helipad) on scheduled operations both during night and day routine flights. The system is foreseen to take-off, patrol, stream live data, land, recharge the batteries and stand-by for the next scheduled operation.

The final goals are represented by the identification of looting activities in real-time, the collection of data for monitoring purposes on the medium and long term period and put in place a deterrence strategy to target specific criminal behavior.

Duration

from April 2020 to March 2022 (2y) (extended to April 2023)

Partners

• The Cyprus Institute, Cyprus (Coordinator)

• Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy - Research Unit TeV

• INESCTEC, CRAS, Portugal