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Preventing terrorist attacks while they are already in motion is extremely difficult. Not only is it difficult to find an explosive on a person or in a bag but one also must face the need to do this in a very short time – seconds – and then immediately implement measures for countering the attack once a possible suspect or suspicious object has been found.
This is why much focus on preventing terrorism is put on methods that apprehend the threat long before an attack takes place.
The LOTUS concept, developed by Portendo, is aimed at finding illicit explosives and narcotics manufacturing. A network of mobile sensors detect precursors to explosives or narcotics over a wide urban area. This allows for law enforcement to react long before the threat becomes real.
These distributed detectors continuously sample air while its carrier performs its daily work. The carrying vehicle could be law enforcement, fire trucks or even an ordinary delivery truck that cover a large area. A benefit is that the driver of the carrying vehicle does not need to operate the detector and in fact, should not even know if any threats are detected. When a suspicious substance is detected in elevated amounts, information about the type, location, amount and time is registered and sent to a data collection and evaluation centre for analysis.
Several indications in the same area will trigger an alert, enabling law enforcement agencies to further investigate and respond.
LOTUS is a collaborative project funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement No 217925. The partcipants are besides Portendo and FOI, who is the project coordinator, AIT, Bruhn Newtech, Bruker, Ramem, SAAB, Secrab, TNO and the Universitat de Barcelona. The overall objective of the LOTUS project is to develop a new anti-terrorism tool for law enforcement agencies, in the form of an integrated surveillance system for continuous chemical background monitoring with fixed site and/or mobile detectors to identify “chemical hotspots” such as bomb or drug factories.
Portendo has patented the system concept of networking the sensors and has developed the system design. The communication unit (router) and a sensor based on IR absorbtion spectroscopy is also part of Portendo's contributions to the project.
Portendo's prototype precursor sensor at its virgin mission
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Links
LOTUS web site: http://www.lotusfp7.eu
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