Developing an Airborne Optical Systems Testbed (AOSTB)

The United States shares 5,525 miles of land border with Canada, and 1,989 miles with Mexico. Monitoring these borders, which is the responsibility of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), is an enormous task. Detecting and responding to illegal activity while facilitating lawful commerce and travel is made more difficult by the expansive, rugged, diverse, and thickly vegetated geography that spans both often-crossed borders. To help mitigate the challenges to border surveillance, a group of researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory is investigating whether an airborne ladar system capable of imaging objects under a canopy of foliage could aid in the maintenance of border security by remotely detecting illegal activities.

Requisite for effective border protection is timely, actionable information on areas of interest. Leveraging the Laboratory's experience in building imaging systems that exploit microchip lasers and Geiger-mode avalanche photodiodes, the research team developed and tested two concepts of operations (CONOPS) for using airborne ladar systems to detect human activity in wooded regions.