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Coalitions of things: supporting ISR tasks via Internet of Things approaches
In the wake of rapid maturing of Internet of Things (IoT) approaches and technologies in the commercial sector,
the IoT is increasingly seen as a key ‘disruptive’ technology in military environments. Future operational environments
are expected to be characterized by a lower proportion of human participants and a higher proportion of
autonomous and semi-autonomous devices. This view is reflected in both US ‘third offset’ and UK ‘information
age’ thinking and is likely to have a profound effect on how multinational coalition operations are conducted
in the future. Much of the initial consideration of IoT adoption in the military domain has rightly focused
on security concerns, reflecting similar cautions in the early era of electronic commerce. As IoT approaches
mature, this initial technical focus is likely to shift to considerations of interactivity and policy. In this paper,
rather than considering the broader range of IoT applications in the military context, we focus on roles for IoT
concepts and devices in future intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) tasks, drawing on experience
in sensor-mission resourcing and human-computer collaboration (HCC) for ISR. We highlight the importance of
low training overheads in the adoption of IoT approaches, and the need to balance proactivity and interactivity
(push vs pull modes). As with sensing systems over the last decade, we emphasize that, to be valuable in ISR
tasks, IoT devices will need a degree of mission-awareness in addition to an ability to self-manage their limited
resources (power, memory, bandwidth, computation, etc). In coalition operations, the management and potential
sharing of IoT devices and systems among partners (e.g., in cross-coalition tactical-edge ISR teams) becomes a
key issue due heterogeneous factors such as language, policy, procedure and doctrine. Finally, we briefly outline a
platform that we have developed in order to experiment with human-IoT teaming on ISR tasks, in both physical
and virtual settings
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