Challenge 1: Surveil the rainforest to keep rebels out
Belgian Defence supports our allies in Africa by training and mentoring troops alongside national borders.
This border region is vast, and troops are spread out very thin to prevent rebel groups infiltrating the country. Rebels instigate insecurity to be able to profit of the richness of the area; they also destroy the very valuable ecosystems across the region through foraging.
Your challenge is to create IoT devices that would help our mentors and the allied troops control a very volatile region. The solutions you develop could also be implemented in other large border areas, such as the Sahel or Finland. This challenge is split up into three sub-challenges.
It’s not a trivial challenge:
- The area is massive, and the mentors and allied troops are so few that they have no way of monitoring the whole area.
- Dense tree canopy of the rainforest and low clouds mean that the usual aerial surveillance is of limited use; besides, its cost is a tangible burden on the sparse budget. Satellite coverage is useless for the same reason – or way too expensive for the units. The use of unmanned systems is likewise limited.
- Troops come from various ethnic backgrounds and use 3-4 different languages. Many of them are not 100% literate.
- Equipment of the troops is quite limited: no big screens, while laptops are in use. In the field, smartphones are often used, but they are not exactly top-of-the-range equipment
- Troops are sometimes working in small teams – so, equipment should be portable and installable by a single person
- While the allied troops and our Belgian mentors are very inventive and can accomplish much with very little resources, components need to be as standard, ubiquitous and inexpensive as possible (e.g. laptop batteries or even standard laptop battery cells).
Challenge 1A: Collect
Border troops need more eyes and ears. On the ground, up in the trees, and all over the region.
Your challenge: create inexpensive (target: around EUR 100 cost per unit), easily repairable or even potentially manufacturable locally, ruggedised devices integrating multiple sensors and communications capabilities that would help the troops keep track of vehicles and people in the remote parts of the region.
Every bit of data can help! Your sensors might include – but not be limited to – the following:
- Capturing mobile phone / satellite phone signatures (not content, just detection and identification)
- Seismic sensors
- Very cheap cameras, daylight or infrared
- Motion detection
- Acoustic sensors
Let your imagination run wild!
Challenge 1B: Transmit
It’s not enough to collect data. Sharing data over the vast distances of the region presents its own unique challenges: there’s no 3G or 4G infrastructure available. Trees (especially trees with large leaves) block Wi-Fi signal.
Your challenge is getting creative with sending data over long distances – and keep in mind that some connectivity is better than no connectivity at all 😉
A few obvious starting points include:
- LoRa
- Wi-Fi mesh networks
- Satellite networks (used frugally, of course) – e.g. Iridium modems or even Starlink
Remember: think low-tech as well as high-tech. Innovative deployment and use of antennas, UAVs (copters and fixed-wing). No idea is too insane to try!
Challenge 1C: Display
Getting the right information will help troops stay out of danger and coordinate their actions. But how can the newly available sensor data be translated to the hardware troops already have: smartphones, laptops, radio, and more?
Your challenge is to help the troops take better informed decisions. To that end, you’ll need to understand the kind of decisions troops need to make, and to design the interface that would show the data in a user-friendly, clear manner.
Keep in mind that a great solution would also connect and produce output to a standard communications systems (ATAK).
Register now
Register now to take part in the Battlefield of Things Hackathon! The Hackathon will start in the evening on Friday, March 15th and will continue until the evening of Sunday, March 17th.