Complete Protection System – Talos

The most important features of the system are scalability, autonomous operation, mobility, adaptability and modular construction. Through its flexibility it should be easy to adjust the system to the local requirements such as border length and topographic conditions. Important role in the project is given to Border Guards from countries with EU external land border and FRONTEX agency in order to tailor system to end user needs and requirements.

TALOS project consortium gathered adequate resources to face the challenge. The system has been developed by experts working for 14 institutions from 8 EU member states (Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Poland, Romania, Spain) as well as 1 EU candidate (Turkey) and 1 associated country (Israel). A wide range of the necessary competencies has been ensured by composing the consortium of industrial companies, research institutions, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and a technical university. Project budget summed up to nearly 20 million Euro, 13 million of which has been granted by the EC.

Main scientific and technological results were achieved in three basic TALOS subsystems – communication, Command & Control and UGV subsystem. Communication subsystem consisted of a new network architecture based on two types of building blocks (or types of network nodes): the TALOS Base Stations (TLS) and TALOS Remote Stations (TLR). It also included the study and simulation of robust and scalable algorithms for the construction of a heterogeneous topology network, for cooperative access and routing, cooperating data forwarding and signalling mechanisms. It has been confirmed that mobile WiMax technology in this application provides good performance in terms of coverage, capacity and latency and developed communication architecture allows proper planning, monitoring and control of the mission with a high degree of autonomy and very low intervention from the Commander/Operator. C&C subsystem consisted of Commander OCU, Operator OCU, UAV simulator, Static Sensor Tower simulator and 3D Maps/Terrain Model Generation Station installed in a single shelter. It has been proved that one operator can supervise two UGVs and cooperation between UGV and UAV systems can be performed through single C&C unit. In UGV subsystem main scientific work was done around following technological gaps – localization without GPS, traversability and path planning, UGV sensors data fusion, autonomous behaviour capability. During the TALOS system development, a significant progress has been made on most of the technological challenges. The system was successfully demonstrated, showing autonomous behaviour, path planning, low level control and sensors fusion. However, there are still challenges to deal with mainly in terms of further development of algorithms for navigation without GPS or SLAM.

TALOS project is influencing European research by contributing to the exploration of the field of robotic perception (sensors processing / fusion), multi robot command and control as well as mobile communication. It is also promoting research in other fields: mapping and localization, artificial intelligence, low level vehicle control and robotic navigation.

Project Context and Objectives:
The overall goal of the TALOS project was to prove the concept of a land border surveillance system based on unmanned vehicles by developing, testing and validating the technology demonstrator of the system.