HMGCC Co-creation Challenge: Rapidly deployed tech to track intruders

This challenge is open to sole innovators, industry, academic and research organisations of all types and sizes. There is no requirement for security clearances.

You can collaborate with other organisations to form a consortium.

The UK government operates permanent and temporary facilities globally in various environments. Once a new location has been selected, unauthorised access is prevented by various means prior to and during occupation of that space. However, it is not always possible to deploy permanent intruder monitoring systems in some situations.

A leave behind and standalone intruder detection system that can be rapidly deployed by nontechnical staff is required. This is a chance to explore using high-tech sensors which may not be available in standard long-standing systems, but which could be deployed into these types of alarm.

A delegation of government officials is expected to occupy a building in an on overseas city while attending a trade and business investment seminar. Sensitive conversations and activities will need to take place in the building, and it is important these are protected.

Once the building has been selected, it is important that it is secured as soon possible ensuring it hasn’t been compromised prior to government officials occupying this space. The officials may also need to be away travelling for some of the time when in the country, so they must have the confidence that, even if the building is left unoccupied, there is no chance that unauthorised intrusion can have taken place. The temporary building will already have been furnished with a level of protection meeting certain UK government security standards.

This particular overseas location does not have a reliable power infrastructure, so power outages can take place. Although the building has a back-up system, this will only provide power for a limited period. Prolonged outages could mean that crucial systems, such as an intruder monitoring system, could be interrupted.

The output of the 12-week project should focus on demonstrating technology that shows potential for follow-on projects. This is open to Technology Readiness Levels from 4 – 7, and could focus on different parts of the challenge, such as:

1. High-tech sensors for intruder monitoring.
2. Full system development, considering ease of use (e.g., sensors easy to install, GUI, etc.).
3. Encrypted communication to ensure that information captured from the sensors has a low probability of interception.

Mandatory targets for a solution are listed below. This doesn’t necessarily need to be solved during the 12-week project, but a clear path to provide a solution for this must be considered.

• Must sense human presence in an environment.
• Must be power efficient and be able to run for extended periods of time without mains power (although backup power doesn’t have to part of the solution).
• Must demonstrate that it is (or could be) useable and deployable to non-technical personnel.
• Must be scalable to be deployed from a single room up to a large-scale facility.
• Must offer remote monitoring in real time.
• Must be usable world-wide.
• A full system must have an API to allow integration into existing monitoring solutions.
• Must have anti-tamper and anti-jamming capability.
• The system must comply with International Air Transport Association (IATA) dangerous goods regulations (such as lithium battery regulations used as backup power options) to enable transport on regular commercial flights.

Targets that should or could be met, and further considerations:

• The communication from the sensor/processor to the user should be encrypted.
• It could use low-power processing methods such as edge artificial intelligence reducing power consumption.
• It could have different modes of operation, for example if a system uses multiple sensors, then power saving modes could be initiated to turn off certain sensors.
• During development, an alarm system does not need to conform to BS-EN50131, but this should be considered for future phases of work.
• The solution could sense if a perimeter has been compromised by non-human presence outside the specified boundary (e.g. a drone).
• The system should be small enough to be easily carried by a person, for example aircraft cabin bag size.
• The system should be able to securely log data locally, for instances when the remote monitoring link is unavailable.
• The system should be able to push notifications to end users.
• The system could have multi-sensor verification.

Please note: This challenge will not consider solutions using basic sensors such as passive infrared (PIR) and cameras.

An online Briefing Call will be held on Thursday 28 November 2024 at 10:00am. Click here to register for a place.

Clarifying questions or general requests for assistance can be submitted directly to cocreation@hmgcc.gov.uk, please also copy to Co-Creation@dstl.gov.uk, prior to the cut-off date. These clarifying questions may be technical, procedural, or commercial in subject, or anything else where assistance is required. Please note that answered questions will be published to facilitate a fair and open competition.

If possible, please submit applications via a HMGCC community collaborator, such as Innovate UK Business Connect’s Security and Defence team.