Developing a Robotic Hybrid Network for Coastal Surveillance: the INFORE Experience

INFORE EU H2020 project has the objective of developing a real-time, interactive extreme-scale analytics and forecasting system capable of handling and analysing massive data streams. The system is validated in three different real-world use cases, In this paper we describe one of them, presenting the development of the INFORE system for a coastal surveillance Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) application. The MSA INFORE system exploits the synergy between global view (AIS data, ESA Sentinel satellite data), providing contextual information over a wider area, and local view produced by a sensorised hybrid robotic network. The network is composed of an RGB/thermal camera onshore and of two Wave Gliders robots equipped with passive sonars. We focus on the development of this network, describing the cooperative autonomy framework to control the robots. The framework enables the robots to make decisions on their navigation for improving vessel detection and tracking. The INFORE MSA network demonstrates the benefits that the synergy between machine learning, AI and autonomous robots can bring in this kind of monitoring systems. The developed autonomy strategies increase the quality of the information produced by robots. These high-quality real-time observations are fused with the global view in the INFORE MSA and decision-support platform. Data fusion from multimodal data sources results crucial for the detection of complex events (e.g. illegal fishing), which can then be communicated to decision-makers. Different modules of the systems are ready and under testing. The whole system will be validated in a trial in 2022.