The objective of the SURICATE project - SURveillance of InfrastruCtures (energy and transport) and environment, with long endurAnce remoTEd piloted air systems - is to deploy a UAV system for automatic searching or surveillance on a given extensive infrastructure, like energy, transport or communication network. The project aims to solve some technological key challenges, and also some regulatory challenges, and to test in real conditions the automatic searching / monitoring process. The scope of the project is to study the interest of using Unmanned Aerial Systems for civil applications, two of them being: * the surveillance of railways (for SNCF particularly), in order to figh against malicious acts and cables theft. * the other one the inspection of high voltage electric cables (for EDF, ERDF, RTE, and also SNCF). Some other applications are also addressed, like environment surveillance and pollution detection. The corresponding market is huge with several tens of thousands of km of cables or rails to be inspected in France only and operators looking for innovative and cheaper solutions than what is available today. Proving the feasability of an efficient solution based on UAVs at the end of this project could pave the way for very promising new markets for UAS use. However, introducing UAS into a civil / commercial marketplace requires to render the UAS a viable, cost effective and regulated alternative to existing resources, and many technological and regulatory key challenges have to be solved. Particularly, the following topics will be adressed in the SURICATE project. * Mission chain: type of sensors, algorithms for detection and tracking of objects of interest, video compression * Communication, with LOS and SATCOM data-links, using civil frequencies and medium bandwith systems. * Airspace regulation The final objective of the project is to propose a roadmap for the use of long endurance UAS for civil market, regarding technical , financial and regulatory aspects. The proposed roadmap should include short (2016), medium (2018) and long (>2020) term issues. The proposed consortium, leaded by CASSIDIAN, is composed of complementary expertises, mixing industrial (CASSIDIAN, Thales Alenia Space), SME (VITEC), university/rechearch institute (ENSEEIHT, Telecom ParisTech) and end-users (EDF, SNCF) teams.