Unattended Ground Sensors Standards Working Group: Transforming the unattended sensor paradigm

The FY 10-15 Defense Intelligence Guidance (DIG) issued by the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (USDI) tasked the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to generate an Unattended Ground Sensors (UGS) roadmap. The roadmap was intended to encapsulate a broad understanding of ongoing and planned UGS development and deployment activities across the Department of Defense (DoD). This understanding supports an evolution to a cross-DoD and intelligence community (IC) integrated approach for acquiring and fielding UGS. To further this approach, a memorandum signed by the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Technical Collection & Analysis endorsed the creation of an UGS Standards Working Group (SWG)(1). The UGS SWG is working across the defense community via its newly established Technology Focus Groups (TFGs) to address the specifics of the open architecture standards for unattended sensors (OASUS). Derived from the Terra Harvest-developed, open, integrated battlefield UGS architecture, OASUS separates the UGS system into fundamental components and standardizes internal and external interfaces to optimize interoperability. The TFGs are looking specifically at software component architecture, wired and wireless interfaces, and physical and logical user interfaces. This paper details the progress of these focus group efforts and invites participation in ongoing development of unattended sensor standards that advance the technology beyond the familiar pattern of controller, trigger, and camera.