LandX20 Experiment Report – experiment for future land warfare capabilities with focus on increased situational awareness and unmanned systems

LandX20 was a collaborative experiment and demonstration where four research projects from the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) participated. The goal of the experiment was two-fold. The first goal was to develop a situational awareness system that could use unmanned assets, and to field test it under controlled conditions. The second goal was to demonstrate the future possibilities for such a system to invited guests. The experiment and demonstration took place between 31 August to 4 September 2020, the integration week, and between 14 and 18 September, where the last day was the visitor’s day. The experiment included many different systems developed at FFI. Two Sentry systems, which include radars and Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras, were used to track persons and vehicles. The tracked persons and vehicles were displayed on a map in a newly developed Graphical User Interface (GUI), which is web based using the CesiumJS framework. A swarm of four Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) was also present. These have been designed and built at FFI, and can be tasked to monitor an area, detect and track persons, and report the results in the new GUI. Additionally, two Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) were present at the experiment. One of the UGVs was used for autonomous terrain navigation and the other was equipped with the Sentry system. The last system was a passive Radio Frequency (RF) sensor system used for detection and localization of radio emitters. The experiment was successful. The system for situational awareness, which consisted of the two Sentry systems, the drone swarm and the newly created GUI, was demonstrated to the visitors, along with the passive RF sensor system. However, due to hardware problems, the UGV was unable to drive autonomously during the event.