SCOUT

Search-and-rescue operations, wildlife monitoring, and precision livestock management increasingly require technologies capable of operating efficiently in remote and challenging environments where conventional communication infrastructure is unavailable or unreliable. Existing solutions often rely either on visual sensing systems with limited coverage and reduced effectiveness in low-visibility conditions, or on communication technologies that are not designed to simultaneously support sensing, coordination, and real-time situational awareness. This creates major challenges for rapidly detecting and localizing humans or animals across large outdoor areas, particularly in forests, mountainous regions, or disaster-affected zones.

The SCOUT project is inspired by the need for autonomous and intelligent systems capable of combining wireless communications, distributed sensing, and artificial intelligence into a unified operational platform. The project team will address challenges related to reliable inter-UAV communications, sensing in dense vegetation and adverse weather conditions, distributed coordination of autonomous drones, real-time data processing at the edge, and the fusion of heterogeneous sensing modalities. By tackling these challenges, SCOUT aims to contribute to the next generation of resilient aerial systems for outdoor situational awareness and emergency support.

SCOUT develops an intelligent UAV swarm platform that combines Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), AI-driven perception, and distributed wireless networking to support outdoor human and animal detection in remote environments. The project integrates multiple sensing modalities, including wireless sensing, RGB cameras, and thermal imaging, allowing UAVs to collaboratively detect, localize, and monitor targets even under challenging environmental conditions. The system is designed to operate with limited or no existing communication infrastructure, enabling autonomous coordination and real-time information exchange between drones.

What makes SCOUT particularly innovative is its holistic integration of communication, sensing, and edge intelligence into a cooperative UAV ecosystem. Instead of treating sensing and communications as separate functionalities, the project leverages communication signals themselves as sensing mechanisms while combining them with AI-based visual analytics and multi-modal data fusion. This approach increases detection robustness, improves situational awareness, and enables more reliable operation in environments where traditional sensing approaches may fail.

Within the project, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) leads the research activities related to advanced wireless networking, inter-UAV communications, ISAC technologies, and multi-modal target detection. LIST contributes its expertise in next-generation wireless systems, edge intelligence, and experimental networking platforms to design, integrate, and validate the communication and sensing framework underpinning the SCOUT platform.

SCOUT will deliver advanced UAV communication and sensing architectures, AI-based target detection algorithms, multi-modal data fusion mechanisms, and experimental demonstrators validated in representative outdoor environments. The project will also produce integrated software and hardware prototypes capable of supporting collaborative aerial sensing and autonomous situational awareness in remote areas.

The technologies developed within SCOUT have the potential to significantly improve the efficiency, safety, and responsiveness of search-and-rescue missions, wildlife monitoring activities, and precision livestock management operations. By enabling autonomous UAV swarms to collaboratively detect and localize humans or animals over large and difficult-to-access areas, the project could reduce intervention times, improve operational coverage, and support faster decision-making for emergency responders and field operators. Beyond these use cases, the project’s innovations could also contribute to future autonomous monitoring systems, environmental surveillance applications, and next-generation intelligent aerial platforms.