ARESIBO aims at realizing an innovative platform based on “Mobile Augmented Reality”, Wearables, Swarm Robotics and AI to provide border guards with user-friendly tools for “improved situation awareness”.
In particular, the project description claims that the system “will improve the cognitive capabilities and the perception of border guards through intuitive user interfaces, will help them acquire a clear and more accurate understanding of the current conditions by filtering the huge amount of available information stemming from multiple sources and, ultimately, will help them respond fast and effectively when a critical situation takes place.”
ARESIBO adopts
1) unmanned vehicles of “all types”, including Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs), and Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs);
2) “Augmented Communication and Sensing” (focussing on “the development of the communication networks and protocols, the mobile robotic devices and UxVs, the sensing elements and their customization that is needed to achieve integrated situation awareness during border surveillance and monitoring”);
3) “Augmented Intelligence for integrated situation awareness;”
4) “Augmented Reality for integrated situation awareness.”
More precisely, “It will enhance the current state-of-the-art through technological breakthroughs in Mobile Augmented Reality and Wearables, Robust and Secure Telecommunications, Swarm Robotics and Planning of Context-Aware Autonomous Missions, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), in order to implement user-friendly tools for border and coast guards.”
Outputs and results of the ARESIBO project were meant to inform recommendations for an enhancement of the EUROSUR handbook, so that they could be properly integrated.
The project was also deemed “of interest” by Frontex in 2020, together with EU-funded projects such as ANDROMEDA, COMPASS2020 and D4FLY.
The agency participated in a review of the technical and operational objectives of ARESIBO in 2021 (in a now removed article; and in Frontex’s Public Register of Documents), during which a “demonstration of the first version of the ARESIBO operational prototype” was held by the Hellenic Ministry of Defence.
Project outputs were tested in two large-scale trials: one for land border technologies (in Imatra, Finland, just 15 km away from the border with Russia) and one for maritime ones (in Greece).
According to deliverable D7.3, the former “aimed to demonstrate integrated situation awareness in challenging conditions with improved perception for field patrols, tactical commanders and C2 operators,” including “through intuitive AR interfaces;” the latter “uses information fed from UxS assigned to illegal migration surveillance” instead. Both featured “the integration of technical surveillance systems into innovative surveillance platforms and novel user interfaces for presenting a situational picture.” Also, both pilots included “augmented reality devices” to help the border guard patrols “expose and stop any illegal activity in the border zone.”
Some broad “lessons learned” are also included in D7.3, painting augmented reality in a positive light — even though “Especially for the maritime border case some functionalities limitations of using the HoloLens AR device on board patrolling ships were reported.”
Detailed results are provided in deliverable D7.4, including questionnaires to participants. We however understand that several aspects of the pilots were “not appropriate for statistical analysis” given the very limited nature of the sample of respondents — which, by the way, were all males for the Finland trial and largely (78,6%) male for the Greek one.
The Greek trial also gave somewhat ambiguous results in terms of AR usability: “According to the results” of the questionnaire, “the ease of use of AR devices has been in general evaluated positively – clear, understandable, and straightforward with the various functions of AR well integrated. On the other hand, it seems that users found that the learning curve for AR & WT would be too high compared with the value they would offer, and they would need technical support. Moreover, users reported that in some cases AR devices were lacking stability and reliability.”
Several deliverables include reflections on the ethical issues raised by the project (including a CONFIDENTIAL one — readable only by members of the Consortium — based on this premise: “Due to the severity of the ethics issues raised by the proposed research, an Ethics Board must be established which includes, in addition to the already identified ethical expert, relevant independent expertise to monitor the ethics issues”). However, none is public even more than two years after its conclusion.
“Details on potential dual use implications of the project and risk-mitigation strategies must” also “be submitted as a deliverable” — but again, these are CONFIDENTIAL too.
More generally, all ethics-related deliverables (D9.1-D9.15) are labeled “CONFIDENTIAL”, i.e. meant to be read only be members of the Consortium and the Commission Services.
Some notions can be derived from publicly available material nonetheless.
For example, D1.4 illustrates the ARESIBO Workshop on ‘Fundamental rights, ethical and societal issues in border surveillance’ which took place on the 26th of April, 2022, which included the participation of human rights and civil society organizations — and which was followed by “in-depth interviews with relevant experts and stakeholders” to actually operationalize its results within the project’s ethical approach.
Furthermore, ethics issues related to the pilots are addressed in D7.3. Ethics-based questionnaires to survey pilot participants are also addressed in D7.4. However, the “Interpretation of the results” concerning the Finnish trial ethics questionnaire concludes that “Unfortunately, the results cannot be cross-interpreted because of the low number of respondents. Also, there seems to some uncertainty regarding the answers for the devices the respondents have answered they have used”. For example, “The replies could indicate that all Field Officer end users have not known what was the device they used and as HoloLens is a commonly known AR device, it has been chosen too often”.
For the Greek trial, while “it seems that most of the participants felt that there were no ethics issues during the event and the overall feeling of their participation was positive”, some dissatisfaction was nonetheless expressed, with 2 out of 13 participants describing the experience as “disturbing”.
