Application 02 · Force Protection
Force
protection.
Force protection is the work of keeping people, vehicles and sites safe — largely by seeing a problem developing before it arrives. It is unglamorous, continuous, and consumes an enormous share of the people it is meant to protect.
The Problem
The guard force is
drawn from the guarded.
Protecting a site or a moving element means maintaining watch in every direction, continuously. The people doing that watching are drawn from the same limited group being protected, which means protection directly reduces the capacity available for everything else.
It is also the classic vigilance task: long stretches of nothing punctuated by moments that matter enormously. Humans are poorly suited to that pattern and machines are well suited to it, which makes this one of the clearest cases for autonomy in the whole field.
How Autonomy Helps
Cover more ground
with the same people.
An autonomous system can maintain watch on an area indefinitely within its endurance, and only involve a person when something merits attention.
- Continuous watchSustained observation of approaches and perimeters without rotating people through shifts.
- Early warningMore time between detection and arrival, which is the entire value of the function.
- Wider coverageExtending effective awareness well beyond line of sight from the site itself.
- Escalation, not noiseRoutine activity handled quietly; only genuine exceptions raised to an operator.
Design Constraints
What it must
get right.
Very low false alarms
A system that raises the alarm without cause is disabled within a week.
All conditions
Threats do not wait for good weather or daylight.
Low logistics burden
It cannot demand more support than the watch it replaces.
Predictable behaviour
The team must know exactly what the system will and won't do.
Everything described here is under active research and development. Nothing has been fielded, and we do not publish specifications or performance figures. Our first end-to-end mission test is planned for December 2026. Technical detail is shared directly with partners, evaluators and the armed forces under appropriate terms — get in touch.
Talk To Us
Protecting people
and sites?
We're interested in the operational detail — tell us what the job actually demands.