Press Release

EU trade, transport, tourism and economic development are directly dependent on open and safe seas and oceans. EU's maritime borders are widely spread including various topologies from open sea to semi-enclosed cabins with islands and islets. This poses great challenges that affect securing maritime border areas.

RANGER innovates by combining novel radar technologies with innovative supporting technological solutions for early warning, in view of delivering a surveillance platform that offers tracking as well as detection, recognition, and identification of vessels far beyond existing legacy radar systems. More precisely, RANGER exploits the benefits derived from different recent ground-breaking research results in photonic and microwave technologies, OTH and MIMO Radar technologies, machine learning and data fusion mechanisms, advanced decision support systems and data analytics algorithms. All these technologies are combined, along with interoperability means and advanced user interfaces, using a state-of-the-art iterative software and hardware development methodology in order to deliver the overall RANGER platform.

The introduction of Deep machine learning techniques for Automatic Target Recognition and correlation with existing AIS and LRIT will minimize false positives in the tracking capabilities of RANGER system. Furthermore, the RANGER system seamlessly fits and contributes to the CISE framework through the provision of on-demand CISE compliant services.

Two cross-country and cross-organization pilots will be performed in two phases each. The first one will be implemented in France. Similarly, the same approach will be followed during the second validation pilot in a completely different Maritime environment (numerous islands in contrast to the open sea environment of the first pilot) that the Aegean Sea in Greece offers. In both cases the Italian Navy will have real-time access to the surveillance picture that RANGER will provide through the implementation of the RANGER CISE service and its transmission through the developed CISE gateway.