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The MoSAIC Challenge put on by the US and Israel brings urban warfare tech together. (Credit MoSAIC)

TEL AVIV: In an Israeli desert, different autonomous drones will creep around corners and float through doorways, generate 3D layouts of interiors and automatically classify humans, animals and other objects — perhaps while a human places a device on one wall that allows them to “see” threats on the other side.

At least that’s the hope for the upcoming MoSAIC competition, put on by the Israeli military’s research directorate and the Pentagon’s Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate (IWTSD). The idea is to put the latest urban warfare technology to the test, and to see which systems might work in concert with one another in one of the military’s most fraught combat scenarios.

“It is evident that there will be no single technological solution but rather a toolbox of scalable, layered, modular, and multi-functional capabilities to enable operators to remotely and autonomously perform the full range of indoor missions,” the MoSAIC website reads.

The “physical testbed” demonstration portion of the competition will be held next week in Yeruham in the Negev Desert in southern Israel.

For the US, it’s a chance to see some Israeli tech that’s already been proven in urban combat, including some tech that is generally classified but has received permission to compete.

“These systems have proved their capabilities and are now being upgraded as the challenges get more complicated,” a defense source here said.

Tal Inbar, a senior Israeli analyst specializing in unmanned systems, told Breaking Defense Israeli firms have “developed drones, ground robots and auxilery systems that can detect targets in confined areas and attack them either by integral systems or by sharing data with other robotic systems.”

Those capabilities would cover a few of those sought by the competition. The official list says tech should deal with one of five challenges: indoor navigation, room mapping, human/object tagging, tactical robotic systems and human presence detection.

That last one, human presence detection, means the ability to “sense” through walls. One of the Israeli firms involved in the competition, CAMERO-TECH, for instance, makes a device that a soldier can place against the wall that can “see” through to the other side an point out potential threats. (A version of this tech was featured in the French espionage series The Bureau.)

CAMERO-TECH is one of about 40 competitors in the program, according to MoSAIC’s website, from large firms to individuals to Israeli and American university research groups.

The companies are competing for a total of $600,000, divided into each of the five mini-challenges. Perhaps more importantly, winners will gain access to US and Israeli government officials and will accepted into a prestigious start-up program from the Merge Institute in California.