There is a need to collect field information for surveillance or action preparation purposes in today military activities. In present day, these operations are carried out by personnel or air surveillance with various expensive, sophisticated sensors. However, the large volume of collected data makes it difficult to extract timely interpretations for decision making in time critical scenarios. In addition, as the activity is occurring, it is almost impossible to retask the system to resolve ambiguity in the original data. Moreover, these monitoring are difficult to be maintained in volatile situations and the cost of continuous surveillance is high. Not only such a deployment is risky, it is time consuming to prepare, coordinate, and perform. Therefore, there is a need to develop low cost sensors, which collect and report field information to the base autonomously. This is the motivation behind the concept of Autonomous Microsystems for Ground Observation (AMIGO) currently investigated at Defence Research Establishment Valcartier (DREV). This work is to establish preliminary standard; to design and manufacture prototype microsystems; and to identify strategies and directions for further improvement of the units. These systems differ from their counterparts in that they are mission specific so that the reduced demand in sensing robustness and versatility is translated into simpler, computationally less demanding systems.
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