USVA seminar: Resilient USVs for securing critical infrastructure

Description

This seminar focused on the use of resilient uncrewed surface vessels to protect critical maritime infrastructure such as underwater cables, wind farms, and ports. It highlighted technological solutions for autonomous navigation, positioning, tracking and communications in GNSS-denied and contested environments. Through expert talks and live demonstrations, the event fostered collaboration between researchers, industry, and authorities working on the future of secure autonomous maritime operations.

Description complémentaire

The USVA seminar on Resilient USVs for Securing Critical Infrastructure was successfully held at the Visitor Centre Joki in Turku, Finland, bringing together experts from industry, research institutions, and authorities to discuss autonomous maritime solutions for critical infrastructure protection. The event focused on how uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) can be used to safeguard underwater cables, offshore wind farms, and ports in the Baltic Sea, particularly in challenging operational environments where GNSS signals may be jammed or unavailable.

Throughout the day, participants explored solutions for resilient autonomy, including multi-sensor fusion, anomaly detection, secure positioning and timing (PNT), and robust long-range communications. The seminar featured presentations from leading organizations and projects, live technology demonstrations, and networking opportunities with exchanges between technology developers, researchers, and end users.

Program Highlights

Session 1 – Securing Critical Infrastructure:
Presentations covered the USVA project and related initiatives, autonomous vessel development, resilient wireless connectivity, maritime surveillance, and sensor fusion approaches for anomaly detection and tracking. In this session, I presented a distributed multi-sensor, multi-target tracking algorithm for maritime surveillance using fleets of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). The method fuses radar, AIS, and camera data within a Bayesian adaptive particle filtering framework to jointly estimate vessel positions and identities. By combining factorized data association with visual re-identification, the system improves target tracking even when radar detections are sparse or AIS signals are absent. Experiments in a photorealistic maritime simulation show that this approach enhances both localization accuracy and identity consistency, while scaling efficiently to large multi-agent networks.



Session 2 – Securing Autonomy in GNSS-Denied Environments:
Speakers addressed resilient PNT solutions, long-range radio communications for denied environments, and securing geospatial data for autonomous maritime operations.

Agenda:
Juha Kalliovaara, Turku UAS – USVA Project: Protecting Critical Infrastructure with Autonomous Vessels

Mikko Kyllönen, Turku UAS – Building Resilient Wireless Connectivity in Uncrewed Vessels

Jukka Heikkonen, University of Turku – Multi-modal sensor fusion and anomaly detection from AIS data

Antti Lindfors, Luode Consulting

Anna Yli-Kivistö, KNL networks – Long-Range CNHF UxS Radio for Autonomous Uncrewed Systems in Denied Environments

Alexandre La Grappe, Royal Military Academy (Belgium) – Multi-Sensor Multi-Target Tracking for Maritime Surveillance with Autonomous Surface Vehicles using Belief Propagation

Jani Järvinen, Promarine – GNSS Resilience in Denied Environments (WORKING TITLE)

Martta-Kaisa Olkkonen, National Land Survey of Finland – Securing Positioning and Geospatial Data (WORKING TITLE)

Période	10 déc. 2025
Titre de l'événement	USVA Seminar – Critical Underwater Infrastructure
Type d'événement	Une conférence
Degré de reconnaissance	International