The tactical edge of the future battlefield will increasingly feature specialized devices that are designed for a particular purpose, such as radios for communication and accelerometers to detect motion. The resource-constrained and purpose-driven nature of these devices introduce heterogeneity challenges that must be overcome to increase sensing versatility on the battlefield and afford intelligence at the point of need. IoBT research enables multi-purpose exploitation of distributed, heterogeneous, and multi-vantage commodity edge devices and sensors in complex and contested edge environments. Data from multiple modalities must be fused and the computational workload distributed across heterogeneous edge devices to provide real-time situational awareness and circumvent the resource constraints and adversarial denial that may occur at the tactical edge.