A System of Systems solution for perimeter control: Combining Unmanned Aerial System with unattended ground sensor network

The paper describes a novel and practical System of Systems (SoS) approach for perimeter control in ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) applications. The SoS combines an Unmanned autonomous Aerial System (UAS) with an Unattended Ground Sensor (UGS) SoS in order to provide enhanced situation awareness to the users. A simple mini Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with an autopilot capable of waypoint navigation is equipped with additional hardware to become a UAS and is integrated with an existing UGS network, forming a System of Systems of heterogeneous systems. The systems in the resulting SoS are autonomous and they offer the generated information via a subscription based service architecture. The SoS described in the paper offers its detection and identification capabilities as services to external entities. The UGS nodes autonomously detect objects and phenomena of interest (based on information requests received from external entities) and by building up collective situation awareness they are able to classify the detected objects, involving the UAS in image acquisition if an object of interest has been classified. The data collected by the SoS is combined and delivered to the external entity that made the information request. The paper describes the creation of the UAS, its integration with an existing SoS and the evaluation of the performance of the resulting SoS.