Unmanned aerial vehicles are commercially available in a variety of price and weight classes equipped with basic functionality such as waypoint navigation or programmable digital outputs. Consequently, all necessary functionalities for a potential attack are available. Thus, these devices constitute risk. From the perspective of security, for maintenance of essential goods and services in Austria, an adaptation to new kinds of threats is crucial. Currently, the methods for protection of critical infrastructure depend on the individual threat and refer mainly to ground-level perimeter protection and classical surveillance technologies. Especially in the civil sector, this problem has not been adequately addressed in research and industry so far, thus, there are no satisfactory research results today.
Based on the cross-border knowledge from the German G7-Summit in 2015 and Austria's Bilderberg-Meeting in 2015, technological, legal and ethical gaps have been identified, which are addressed in this project. At both events, the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation Wiesbaden and the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior have been working together very closely and efficiently in order to ensure the safety of the guests. This bilateral research project is based on the cross-border knowledge from both events.
The overall objectives of this project are:
- Development and evaluation of technology components in particular electro-optics, acoustics and communications technology, in order to detect potential threats and protect against them using proportionate means of intervention. Sensor fusion of the various sensor technologies will be implemented to ensure a robust and reliable sensor system.
- Constitution of the user processes and interfaces for modern civil air defense systems in terms of interoperability with existing crisis management systems and decision support.
- Examination of the legislative approaches that allow a constitutional intervention and technical means in accordance with the legal bases.
- Implementation and validation of the officially relevant scenarios, with focus on the protection of people and critical infrastructure.
- Examination of the social and ethical aspects of using such technologies in the civilian sector.
Particular emphasis will be put on exceeding the current state of the art of the used technologies as well as providing an instruction manual for official use of the technology and as a decision aid in case such systems are purchased. The results will be shown as a functional technology demonstrator based on the relevant scenarios for authorities.
Project partner
AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH
Frequentis AG
CNS-Solutions & Support GmbH
INRAS GmbH
Austro Control Österreichische Gesellschaft für Zivilluftfahrt mBH
Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH
Donau Universität Krems - Zentrum für Integrierte Sensorsysteme
Bundesministerium für Inneres
Bundesministerium für Landesverteidigung und Sport
Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Innovation und Technologie
Contact
Christoph Sulzbachner
Senior Research Engineer
Autonomous Systems Center for Vision, Automation & Control
AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH
Donau-City-Straße 1 | 1220 Vienna | Austria
T +43 50550-4177 | M +43 664 8251342
christoph.sulzbachner@ait.ac.at
www.ait.ac.at
