Ground Sensors and Surveillance Drones

Security Challenges Lead to Customary Solutions

Security professionals tasked with protecting a facility are faced with an increasing number of challenges each year. This is true whether protecting critical infrastructure assets from a hydroelectric plant or remote high voltage transformers and transmission lines, as well as for our border agents patrolling vast areas of the southern border looking for migrants and/or drug smugglers.

Organizational challenges are also present in many day-to-day security protection programs. Budget constraints and high employee turnover creating a lack of highly trained personnel are all part of the equation when it comes to gauging the success of a response action.

Security teams may have little or no response capability at the site or need to rely on local police who have other responsibilities. Having correct information ahead of time is necessary whether you are preparing your own response or need to rely upon law enforcement to investigate.

Traditional physical security protection often includes a heavy reliance on the perimeter fencing and dealing with the site specific geographic issues surrounding a facility. This level of reliance on protecting a facility’s perimeter can be short sighted. Perimeter security measures like fences, cameras, and access control systems are reactive, not proactive, which may result in a rushed and ineffective threat response.

Another drawback to concentrating on the physical perimeter is a reliance on heavily power driven solutions operating in all-weather conditions, be it cameras or fence-mounted sensors. These can only be deployed near a power source, have ongoing maintenance concerns and do little to provide security beyond the line of sight.

Geography also plays a major role in determining security options. Whether you are in an urban environment where surrounding infrastructure is already in place, or in a remote location with harsh terrain, these are factors that will lead to the security solutions you can choose from.

It may not be cost effective for some organizations to patrol areas in remote locations or low priority facilities. Footstep detection and off-road vehicle buried ground sensors with a slew-to-cue and fly-to-cue capability can overcome these challenges and augment physical security protection without significant investment.

Moving Past CCTV

Today protecting facilities with fences, cameras, and access control systems, continues to be a growing market valued at $37.43 billion in 2021. However, an ever increasing investment in this type of protection doesn’t necessarily mean better security solutions than what we have today.

Organizations considering augmenting their perimeter security with small unmanned aircraft having hands-off autonomous flight capabilities presents an alternative that can be more effective less costly. Closed-circuit television is the long-standing preferred choice as many security teams continue to rely heavily on a sophisticated system of cameras to monitor their perimeter and interior.

Although the technology for these fixed cameras has significantly advanced over the years, they are still faced with a number of inherent drawbacks. Footstep and/or off-road vehicle detection buried ground sensors properly located can effectively augment fences and camera while providing real-time pinpoint alerts to security forces. Alternatively, ground sensor alerts that feed into a surveillance drone’s mission planner creating an automated fly-to-cue capability allowing the drone to autonomously fly directly to the intruder location and use its infrared cameras to autonomously search for the intruders from overhead.

Fixed cameras can only see and zoom so far before the quality is too degraded to allow for effective monitoring. They also have a narrow field of view, leading security professionals to install an abundance of cameras on poles, buildings and fences to monitor every possible angle.

This is not ideal solution as an over reliance on fixed cameras is cost prohibitive, easy to detect, and may require extra monitoring personnel from a central command station. They also can create an atmosphere of an armed camp with personnel or residents feeling that they are always being watched.

A more proactive and cost-effective strategy would be to place buried ground sensors in these blind spots, access points and interior to silently and stealthily monitor illicit footstep and off-road vehicle activity. Progressively placing ground sensors in these hidden areas outward and inward of the perimeter would also allow security teams to over time gain an understanding of activity and movement patterns before potential threats ever reach the property perimeter or get inside.

Additionally, the emplaced ground sensors can “slew-to-cue” the installed fixed cameras to the alert locations. By actively flying drones having EO/IR cameras towards this detection, security teams can obtain greatly improved situational awareness to better develop and prioritize their response.

Fixed cameras need to be hard wired for both power and signal transmission, leading to difficulties installing them beyond the physical perimeter and coping with weather related conditions cause these fixed cameras to degrade in performance over time. Augmenting security teams with battery powered buried ground sensors sending footstep or off-road vehicle alerts to surveillance drones that only fly when alerted alleviates the need to run cables underground, reduces weather related damage to sensitive fixed cameras while allowing remote monitoring of far- reaching areas on an as needed basis. Drones can also be an effective deterrent when intruders are lit up by a hovering overhead drone shining its lights and issuing verbal commands to leave the area. The overhead drone with its blinking lights also becomes a beacon for the responding security forces to quickly find the intruders or chase after them as they run from the area. Fixed cameras or fences have no such deterrent effect as a hovering drone with bright lights and voice commands.

Combining buried ground sensors having a slew-to-cue and fly-to-cue automated interaction with available fixed cameras and small surveillance drones differ from traditional fixed location CCTV security because the cameras and drone can be dormant until awakened by a footstep or off-road vehicle alert attributed to potentially illicit behaviors. Security response teams are likewise not lulled to sleep by monitoring continuous fixed camera feeds. Instead they are alerted to intruders by the buried ground sensors when movements are detected. These alerts are made visible on map-based video displays inside command and control rooms and sent directly to roaming security personnel on their smart devices. Invisible buried ground sensors placed forward of the perimeter allows security teams to gain a better understanding of illicit movement toward the perimeter and sending intrusion detection alerts to surveillance drones is more cost effective and efficient than purchasing a large number of additional fixed cameras. Small drones have the added benefit of being able to scare away intruders by their sudden presence, bright overhead lights and voice commands.

How Fly-to-Cue Plays a Role

The inherent challenges in gathering real-time situational awareness has made proactive surveillance solutions widely used by the US military but slow to reach the commercial market. However, this doesn’t mean it’s any less important that your response be based on the best available information.

But how do you get all the information necessary to gauge a response?

This has a number of implications in real-world scenarios. Utility providers, whether they are electric, telecom, or oil and gas often have facilities in remote locations where it’s not feasible to use security personnel on the ground.

The use of unmanned aircraft or surveillance drones with full motion EO/IR video allows these organizations to be certain that the detection from buried ground sensors or another source is not a false alarm while providing critical information on the number of intruders, weapons or tools they are carrying and direction of travel. With this information, they can be confident that their calls to local authorities or other resources requesting a response are related to a real threat with identifying characterization allowing the response force to know what to expect in advance of arriving on scene.

In the opposite scenario when there is a large amount of infrastructure surrounding a facility, an accurate detection can also be hard to obtain. Dense foliage or existing structures make hiding easy and understanding the intruder’s likely intent difficult.

Footstep detection sensors providing GPS location of the activity followed by high definition EO/IR full motion video allow security teams to have significantly greater situational awareness. This capability involving multi-rotor surveillance drones, is especially useful in urban areas where the use of fixed wing aircraft is restricted.

Limited flight time for multi-rotor UAVs is another critical reason why small unmanned aircraft have struggled to provide complete real-time situational awareness. Every minute a small multi-rotor UAV loses by searching for a target is a minute lost in what is typically a 30 minute flight window. Fly to cue technology sends the UAV directly to the intruder saving battery life and quickening the response.

Ground sensors like Pathfinder allow security personnel to receive a proportional amount of situational awareness early on to prepare their response. Fly to cue automation provides confidence that your unmanned aircraft will go directly to the intruders location. This allows operators to get “eyes on” for the maximum amount of time rather than wasting battery or fuel trying to locate a target, resulting in a reduced amount of time monitoring the target or chasing it away.

Without a clear understanding of where your threats are, the chance of locating them and providing any threat characterization is severely diminished. Pathfinder and its fly-to-cue capabilities provide an ideal solution for security professionals trying to better understand the threat they are responding to.

Scenario: Improving the Protection of Utility Provider Facilities

Organizations maintaining a close eye on their perimeter security at one or more facilities tend to use a central command center to monitor cameras and other security systems. This is common in the private security world but also for utility providers.

As such, their response with trained personnel on the ground for these locations can be limited or delayed. Organizations often rely on local law enforcement to provide a response at remote and lower value locations and must be confident that they are providing the response team with the best information possible.

Reactive security solutions may be able to identify intrusion activity when it is happening but can’t provide a clear picture of what the behavior actually entails and how far it has progressed. Cameras and other traditional solutions oriented on a fence line provide a “too little too late” situation resulting in a lack of information and a suboptimal response.

Proactive solutions such as footstep and/or off-road vehicle detection buried ground sensors using fixed camera slew-to-cue and small surveillance drone fly-to-cue capabilities can overcome these hurdles and allow for an efficient, effective and timely response.

Let’s look at five ways Pathfinder, together with a proactive perimeter security strategy, could prevent or aid the response to an attack on the grid.

1. As is the case in most premeditated attacks, 90% of a threat’s activity occurs during surveillance. They must choose the locations to perform this early reconnaissance and where these areas can be accessed from. This may be a roadside location or another known pathway, but by monitoring these areas with ground sensors such as Pathfinder security forces can get the first point of confirmation for ingress and egress.
2. As threats travel from these points closer to your protected areas,  buried ground sensors can then be used to detect their movements and patterns. If you have an early understanding of which paths they may be forced to take, you can begin to identify their likely intent and not just movement.
3. Finally, most facilities or assets have areas where they are weakest or points identified as being extremely vulnerable. A threat having done reconnaissance will likely target these spots. Placing Pathfinder sensors in these locations will trigger alerts inside these no-go zones where people have no other reason to be there other than to see the target.
4. Cameras mounted around a site’s perimeter would fall short of providing an advance warning and could be easily avoided or compromised by attackers. Pathfinder and the smart slewing of cameras and/or small drones would allow security forces to prepare a more effective response with greater situational awareness. By detecting threat-related activity and monitoring its progression closer to your site, a Pathfinder initiated camera can automatically slew-to-cue once that adversary has crossed a threshold necessitating a response.
5. A high level of situational awareness is needed for any response, especially when local law enforcement is called on. But how do they get all the information necessary to gauge their response?
   Live full motion video provided by a small unmanned aircraft sent via fly-to-cue Pathfinder alerts provides the best opportunity to gain a more complete understanding of the threat activity while simultaneously trying to drive it away. The response team now knows what to look for and can be more effective at responding. This advantage can be gained during pre-incursion surveillance detection as well as in the event of a successful incursion.

How do I learn more about Pathfinder?

It’s easy, just set up a consultation with our industry experts. Applied Research Associates is uniquely qualified to help your organization execute a sound security and emplacement strategy. We can get started with a meeting, product demo, or onsite evaluation.