The Challenge

Leonardo Innovation & Technology Group (ITG) is starting to develop a multi-element sensor network to provide awareness of activities across a widely distributed geographical area to meet the needs of the environmental, resilience and national infrastructure sectors.

Each sensor node in the network will have the ability to process data and information about its immediate environment local at the node.

This data and information have a much broader utility than simply providing local awareness. When combined with the data and information from multiple sensor nodes, a comprehensive collective awareness can be developed. Through interaction across the network, any individual node can improve its own local knowledge either by using data and information from a specific ‘neighbouring’ node or from an understanding of the composite awareness across the full network.

These networks are intended to work automatically, without the need for centralised command and control allowing for maximum flexibility, adaptability and resilience as local environmental factors change. Additionally, to address power and sustainability issues, a key aspect of the de-centralised network will be the minimisation of the amount of data and information which has to be exchanged across the network either to achieve a common, network level awareness or to provide support to an individual node.

Tasks

Leonardo ITG is seeking new and innovative ideas which can contribute to or provide the complete functionality of such an adaptive, de-centralised multi-element sensor network. These ideas should help Leonardo ITG to accelerate their development process.

Routes to consider:

● ITG are seeking innovation in bearer technologies. Wireless infrastructure however faces the challenges of available RF spectrum and bandwidth as well as problems in transmission in austere and densely packed urban environments.

● ITG are seeking novel and new network command and control algorithms and protocols capable of delivering adaptive and flexible de-centralised functionality achieved with a minimum of intra-node interaction.

● ITG are also looking for novel and new higher-level functionality capable of delivering automated, automatic and cognitive behaviors both on a node and network level within the de-centralised architecture

Project phases

Ideation - 11th Aug 2020 to 19th Oct 2020

The first phase of this challenge will give the participants a chance to input their initial ideas around the concept of decentralised sensor networks and how such a system could be created. The aim is to generate fresh discussion and allow participants to learn from each other’s inputs to develop their proposals for the next phase. Towards the end of the phase, participants are invited to submit their final proposals for evaluation. It is at this point that participants should ensure their proposals meet the evaluation criteria set out below. These criteria will be used in the Validation phase to judge the contest winners. Following the closure of the Ideation phase no further contributions will be accepted for this challenge

Validation - 19th Oct 2020 to 30th Nov 2020

The final phase of the contest will be the evaluation and validation of the contest’s contributions by Leonardo ITG and the grading of proposals against our evaluation criteria for the challenge. All contributions will be reviewed at this stage and a 1st, 2nd and 3rd place will be chosen and named the winners of the contest.

Evaluation Criteria:

• Where possible, the network should be independent of physical interconnect infrastructure allowing for rapid deployment and re-deployment (including the use of mobile nodes) to meet the rapidly changing needs of resilience and environmental crisis monitoring.
• Coherence and efficacy of trial results
• Cost of implementing the solution
• Scalability of solution
• Level of specialist skills required to support the solution
• Security of information held / processed by the solution

Prizes

The winners of the contests will receive the following prizes:

• 1^st place: 1.500 €
• 2^nd place: 750 €
• 3^rd place: 500 €

The winners will be selected by Leonardo ITG during the evaluation phase based on the defined criteria. They will be announced in December 2020.