Autonomous Surveillance Tower

Autonomous Surveillance Tower is a persistent ground-based watchpost built by Estonian defence firm DefSecIntel Solutions , introduced in 2021 and now fielded across the Baltic frontier and in Ukraine. The system pairs an electro-optical and thermal camera head on an extendable mast with an onboard compute payload and a solar-and-battery hybrid power pack, letting a single unit watch a stretch of border, perimeter or rear-area road without a permanent power feed and with crews visiting only for periodic maintenance. It belongs to a class of unattended sensor towers that have moved from niche border-guard kit to a standard piece of the modern surveillance picture.

The tower’s working heart is the combination of its sensor head and its onboard detection software. The EO/IR cameras feed a local processor that classifies movement — people, vehicles, small drones — and only flags events of interest, rather than streaming raw video back to an operations centre. Towers are meshed together over radio so that a string of units along a border can hand off tracks and build a continuous awareness picture, with operators monitoring through a central command interface. Power comes from a roof-mounted solar array supplemented by batteries, which is what allows the system to sit deployed in remote terrain for weeks at a time. The mast height, sensor range and exact compute stack vary by configuration, but the concept — autonomous detection at the edge, low bandwidth back to the rear — is consistent across deployments.

Estonia is the lead operator. The Estonian Defence Forces and Police and Border Guard Board have used the towers along the Russian frontier, and from 2022 onward the system has been pushed into Ukraine through aid packages and direct procurement, where units have been used to watch the front line and key infrastructure. Latvia has followed Estonia in fielding the towers along its own eastern border, part of a wider Baltic effort to harden the boundary with Russia and Belarus through a layer of unattended sensors. Combat use in Ukraine has been one of the system’s more visible references, with the towers cited as part of the Estonian government’s in-kind defence support to Kyiv.

DefSecIntel has continued to iterate the platform, and offers it alongside its EOS counter-UAS effector to give customers a paired sensing-and-engagement package. The tower itself sits in a crowded segment — competing with offerings from Anduril, Elbit and other Western suppliers — but its traction with the Baltic states and Ukraine has given it a distinct foothold in the European market for autonomous border surveillance.