Increasing concerns about new threats related to a possible major accident on a nuclear power plant or a tactical nuclear explosion, linked with the war in Ukraine, impose to EU Countries to improve their current capabilities to prepare for and respond to these possible large-scale accidents. The need for advanced technologies, interoperable risk assessment tools, and comprehensive emergency coordination strategies has never been more critical. GUARDIANS will deliver advanced, cost-effective technologies, and strategies to improve disaster emergency management in Europe. The project will enable the development of advanced radiological technologies (radioactive gas sensor, active dosimeter network), innovative and scalable strategies for triage (video analyses, digital triage), decontamination, and medical countermeasures (hydrogel, new strategy for stable iodine distribution). Autonomous means such as drones and robots equipped for radiological measurements and enhanced observation capabilities will increase overall responsiveness. A central web-platform GUARDNET, built upon existing operational tools, will facilitate real-time information processing, synthesis, mission management, and simulation services, to support decision-making. The active participation of first responders/receivers and decision-makers, along with the execution of two field tests and the assessment of the alignment between population needs and authorities' response strategies will ensure that GUARDIANS produces a new and enhanced operational capability to respond effectively to a radiological or nuclear emergency. GUARDIANS will significantly enhance European Member States' ability by providing stakeholders with state-of-the-art capabilities, innovative technologies, and effective coordination strategies. This will accelerate the decision-making process, reduce intervention times, and mitigate human and environmental impacts through improved protection of populations and infrastructures.

The aim of this project is to explore new research directions in terms of architectures, models and algorithms using decision-theoretic and game-theoretic approaches to control operational unit. This unit is composed on autonomous robots navigating in coalition and in coordination with controled robots (tele-operated) with unknown strategies of navigation in support of a person group (slodiers) to patrol and secure their immediat neighborhood. For such systems, GARDES project aims at develping a hierarchical interaction architecture. At the high level of the interaction: autonomous robots and slodiers can interact allowing soldiers to use robots (mode semi-autonomous) by sending them advice. At the low level, autonomous robots and semi-autonomous (controled, tele-operated robots) interact to coordinate their navigation. GARDES aims at exploring decision-theoretic approaches allowing robots to be autonomous and accomplishing a mission and to interact with soldirs for assistance. To this end, the scientific challenges of GARDES are : 1. Multi-robot adjustable autonomy : How autonomous robots take into account the advice of the soldiers. This objective will be based on an approach called Mixed Markov Decision Process (MI-MDP) which allows a robot to decide not only on what to do but when to consider the advice of the soldiers. In GARDES project, we will consider an extension of this model to multi-robot settings and developing a Mixed Decentralized MDPs (MI-DEC-MDP). This is an innovative point of the project. 2. Heterogeneous interaction between autonomous and semi-autonomous robots: This objective concerns the problem of how an autonomous robot computes a coordinated strategy (policy) with semi-autonomous robots with lack of information on their strategies. The DGA PhD thesis of Arnaud Canu is a starting point where a DEC-POMDP has been proposed and we aim at extending this model for limited observability and communication constraints. Also, we consider adapt this approach to a stochastic game by considering semi-autonomous robots as leaders with unknown strategies and autonomous robots as followers which should compute their strategies accordingly. This is an innovative point of the project. 3. Control of an operational unit : This objective consists of considering adjustable autonomy in stochastic games where an autonomous robot should consider the advice of the soldiers to compute mixed policies that should be coordinated by estimated policies of semi-autonomous robots. To our knowledge, considering adjustable autonomy from game theory point of view is novel . This project is not only about fundamental research issues, but it targets scnearios using real robots and considering operational staff. In GARDES, it is envisionned to develop a system and to integrate it in real platforms like µtrooper and Nerva robots developed by Nexter.

The TERRIFFIC project will deliver a step change in the effectiveness of first responders during the first hours of a Radiological, Nuclear, explosive (RNe) incident. It will lead to reduced response time, less health and safety risks for the response team, and less human intervention in the operation due to higher number of automated processes and extended mobile detection capabilities. TERRIFFIC will enrich the European response to RNe events by a set of modular technology components in a comprehensive system, incl. new detectors, algorithms, drones, robots, dispersion models, information management software and decision support systems. The project will provide detailed information on the applicability of some developments within a chemical and biological (C/B) context. Dedicated Key Performance Indicators will measure the progress towards targeted performance goals, such as significant acceleration of the time to start terrain interventions due more accurate and near-to-real-time estimation of the control and exclusion zones. Advanced mixed reality technology will be leveraged to provide first responders with ad-hoc available and continuously updated information during operations. TERRIFFIC is SME-led and practitioner-driven. Leading edge technologies will be provided by the R&D partners, whereas key innovative components will be developed by SMEs already involved in military or first responder markets taking on the commercialisation of the TERRIFFIC System and its components. The practitioners will be strongly involved throughout the development process, components assessment and technology trialling. The project will leverage results from previous successful FP7 projects, closely cooperate with ENCIRCLE on the CBRN Cluster and market aspects, and with eNOTICE on training and technology testing and assessment. Special attention will be given to standardisation to optimise the integration with future and already applied solutions.