Strategy documents from multiple military branches - including the Air Force, Army, and Marine Corps - have emphasized the importance of improved sensing for national security. To improve sensing, the DoD can pursue several approaches. The first is to develop and deploy new kinds of sensing capabilities. This is an essential part of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) modernization, but it can be costly and time consuming. A second approach is to leverage existing nonconventional sensors, such as ones available in consumer products or embedded in physical devices. While these sensors may be lower fidelity, they are economical, widespread, and may detect signals in multiple modalities.
In this post, we describe an ISR paradigm called cyber-physical sensing aligned to the second approach described above, where we explore use of existing commercial sensors to enhance the ISR mesh. We begin by summarizing the foundations and promise of the approach. We then discuss recent advances that could enable cyber-physical sensing to achieve significant benefits in the DoD context and beyond. We end by considering open cyber-physical sensing research areas and opportunities to partner with the SEI.
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