NESTOR aims to extend the protection and safeguarding of Europe´s maritime and land borders. Supported by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Programme, over 20 partners from a dozen states are involved in this project to develop a next-generation holistic border surveillance system to improve situational awareness in both operations at sea and on land.
In the last years, Europe had to cope with challenges on its external borders. This highlighted the need for policies and concrete measures to safeguard Europe's security. Due to this reason, the European Commission and Council initiated several measures towards this direction, as for example establishing The European Border and Coast Guard Agency FRONTEX, setting common standards for all European border guards.
As many responsible authorities operate under severe conditions, the NESTOR projects represents one component to better meet the daily operations and the upcoming challenges at Europe´s borders.
NESTOR follows the idea of the European Integrated Border Management by integrating state-of-the-art technologies for surveillance into a holistic deployable system capable of detecting, assessing and efficiently responding to illegal activities. Data from various single systems and devices will be merged and processed with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve situational awareness and thus optimizing the decision-making of the acting law enforcement authorities. A further aspect of NESTOR is the improvement of the overall operational picture of the surveillance areas.
Users that will profit from the project are all national and European authorities responsible for border surveillance, law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies and security providers as for example the Hellenic Police, the Joint Rescue Coordination Center of Cyprus and the Center for Security Studies of Greece.
As one of the technical partners, HENSOLDT will provide its SPEXER 2000 3D state-of-the-art radar sensor to complete NESTOR´s wide area surveillance system. This will not only provide a detection capability of targets at very long ranges but also support other sensors, like visual and radiofrequency to reach their full potential.
Furthermore, HENSOLDT provides support with the sensor integration through its sound knowledge in this area and an easy accessible API to help creating a holistic, next generation border surveillance system.