University of Arizona Receives Surveillance Grant for Border Patrol

Young-Jun Son, head of the University of Arizona’s Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering, has received a three-year, $750,000 grant from the U.S. Air Force’s Office of Scientific Research to build an integrated and autonomous surveillance system for land and aerial vehicles monitoring the country’s southern border.

University of Arizona systems engineering researchers Young-Jun Son (left), Sara Minaeian and Jian Liu are using these unmanned aerial drones to design an autonomous border patrol surveillance system. Courtesy of UA College of Engineering.

The researchers are applying these skills to help the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection unit gain a clearer picture of border activities for swifter, better-coordinated responses. Homeland Security has used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) equipped with cameras and radar for border surveillance since 2005. Flying at altitudes of 100 ft and higher, the UAVs, or drones, can cover broad swaths of land and quickly detect activities that might be missed by fixed or mobile ground sensors, particularly in remote or mountainous areas.

Ground-based vehicles have their own advantages. Their sensors better detect objects on cloudy days or beneath trees and produce higher-quality images for better identifying individual objects or people. The challenges for the researchers are to choose the right combination of aerial and ground vehicles, given different terrain and weather conditions, and activate them at just the right time.