Electrical and computer engineers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) will develop an internet of things for the battlefield.
The team has received nearly US$4 million from the Army Research Laboratory to develop an internet of things tailored to the challenges of the battlefield. The team consists of Suhas Diggavi, Mani Srivastava and Paulo Tabuada, who specialise in cyber-physical systems, the technology that underpins how all the "things" are connected to the physical environment they are embedded in.
The UCLA engineers will develop theoretical foundations for use in unmanned vehicles, sensors and systems, so these defense technologies can carry out mission objectives by working autonomously, or cooperating with each other and with human soldiers. The battle systems of the future will be able to make data-driven decisions during fluid situations.
A big part of the project involves making it easier for a smaller number of humans to effectively leverage hundreds of sensors, actuators and unmanned vehicles, in order to improve situational awareness and provide soldiers with a tactical advantage.
While engineering truly useful IoT is a challenge in and of itself, doing so in battlefields is even more difficulty, due to the uncertain physical environments, and the presence of humans and adversaries. Resilience and security of the systems will be especially important.
It is expected that advances made in this project will lead to advances in embedded machine learning, computational modeling of human behaviour, and secure and trustworthy IoT platforms.
Recognising their challenges, the researchers are bringing together wide-ranging expertise, from foundational principles of control, information theory, and embedded systems.
It is hoped that the systems that arise from this project will allow humans and technology to work seamlessly on the battlefield, reducing the risk for soldiers and civilians.
The UCLA Engineering project is part of a larger, five-year multi-organisational collaboration called the Alliance for Internet of Battlefield Things Research on Evolving Intelligent Goal-driven Networks (or IoBT REIGN), consisting of a consortium of leading research institutions.
[Image: UCLA Engineering is developing an internet of things for the battlefield. Credit: Fair use.]