Deadline: 24-Nov-22
The European Commission (EC) is seeking proposals to address the development of innovative multi-national collaborative land combat operational capabilities in order to optimize the use of the new or upgraded military land systems that are being developed by different European countries.
The collaborative scenario will include all tactical levels (from dismounted soldier up to operation command post) ensuring information sharing between every entity on the battlefield through a robust flexible and secure communication framework. Furthermore, they may cover several collaborative functions ranging from geolocalisation and observation to manoeuvre or fire coordination.
Objectives
- The evolution of threats: In the next 10 to 15 years, the evolution of threats will drastically change the management of land operations linked to other domains. The forces will face a new conflict, including technological dissemination and porosity between different categories of opponents.
- The operational context: A very harsh environment with high intensity activities will also characterize the future battlefield, including the land domain. Indeed, the land environment is recognized as hostile, very diverse on the planet scale, fast changing (so that existing maps rapidly do not apply anymore) and complex (with terrain compartments which may block vision as well as communication links), presenting various levels of structuration (from open to urban terrain, which represents a real challenge for image processing or for autonomous vehicles and robotics).
- The technological context: The overall protection of armoured vehicles keeps improving thanks to passive and active protection systems as well as additional layers of protection or new structure materials (lighter and more resistant). Future dismounted soldiers may benefit from mobility enhancement (with the use of light exoskeletons for instance), which will make them more agile. Automation may also play a key role in transforming future battlefields.
Details
They must include:
- Common analysis of operational scenarios (possibly warfare simulation), consistent with the participating Member States and Norway (pMS) planned and fielded tactical products and targeted platforms (vehicles, containers, soldiers, radios, etc.);
- Identification of key enabling technologies;
- Definition of a coordinated approach concerning middleware architecture frameworks for land collaborative combat;
- Analysis of applicable standards and norms as well as evolution proposals;
- Definition and realization of incremental real world key demonstrations (including preliminary prototyping within simulated environment).
Funding Information
The available call budget is EUR 50 000 000.
Expected Advantages and Benefits
Expected advantages and benefits of collaborative warfare:
- Speed up and improve the decision-making process;
- Reduce the time between threat detection / aggression and action or respond (e.g., manoeuvre, fire, close air support);
- Make critical information available at the right time to the right user (“actionable intelligence”);
- Share knowledge / understand a situation, in real time or near real time with the neighbouring units;
- Create and share a recognized ground picture (RGP) in real time (condition of NATO Federated Mission Network (FMN) spiral 2 and higher), to constantly update situational awareness and feed the Joint Common Operational Picture (JCOP) and vice versa;
- Enable friendly forces to gain the tactical initiative (which means presenting the situation and the options in an adequate way to the operator using adapted human machine interface (HMI), for instance with augmented reality, modelling or simulation);
- Enable a dynamic and reliable interoperability when using the different manned/unmanned platforms (size, weight, type, theatre crossing speed, presence of unmanned systems etc.) and therefore trigger mobility skills to define a complex combat collaboration among systems, which can capitalize information in order to interact efficiently and proficiently.
Eligibility Criteria
In order to be eligible, the applicants (beneficiaries and affiliated entities) must:
- be legal entities (public or private bodies)
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be established in one of the eligible countries, i.e.:
- EU Member States (including overseas countries and territories (OCTs))
- non-EU countries
- have their executive management structure established in eligible countries
- must not be subject to control by a non-associated third country or nonassociated third-country entity
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