4 minute read
The Drone Follower Project
In 2022, the NCI Agency partnered with the Rotterdam University of Applied
Sciences on the ‘Drone follower project’.
Jim Winchester asks NCI Agency Principal
Scientist, Mario Behn: what the project covers, what it hopes to achieve and how it will help the NCI Agency enhance
NATO capabilities
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Q
What does the drone follower project involve?
A The drone follower project focuses on counter-drone technology which is used to detect and/or intercept unmanned aircraft systems (UASs), aka drones. We came up with this project to give a group of students at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences the opportunity to develop a proof-of-concept approach for detecting a drone and trying to intercept or follow it. This activity required students to consider: can you, for example, recognize a drone from the other things around you? At what range can you observe it and how do you even get the information on where the drone is – do you use radar or cameras? For this project, we used a small radar.
The NCI Agency provided some drones as the training set as well as another drone fitted with a radar to detect the target drone. The students decided to use an incremental approach, so they first demonstrated the proof of concept by detecting a car on the ground with the radar mounted on the drone.
Now, it’s one thing to mount a radar on a drone to carry out some trials, but it is another thing entirely to end up with something useable. However, there are already counter-drone products on the market which have, in addition to a radar, a net shooting from behind or a net cage coming from underneath. These are used to safely catch a target drone and deliver them to be analysed. In the most recent NATO counter-UAS technical interoperability exercise (TIE), we saw a few of these technologies being applied.
At the TIE, command and control manufacturers and vendors came together to test whether they could actually speak the same technical language, making sure that whatever information the sensor picked up was computed correctly, and then the effector – for example, a follower drone with a net – had sufficient guidance to follow the threat drone.
Q
Would this approach be effective against all forms of ‘Class One’ drones, those up to 150kg?
A If you’re not using a drone fitted with a net, you can try to ram the target drone in an attempt to destroy it. Even if one uses a smaller drone as an interceptor drone, such as the DJI Matrice M300, which is around 20kg, it could still do critical damage to drones of up to 100kg. So, from a technical point of view, an M300 might be sufficient to foil the target drone’s attack. Whether the drone is completely destroyed, that’s a different story – that would be a ‘unit kill’, but a ‘mission kill’ is usually what you want to achieve.
Q
Is there a place for artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomy in the terminal phase?
A Absolutely. AI or machine learning usually capitalizes on what you already have, such as a primed database of your common threat drones. However, you might have to tailor your approach. For example, if you know the exact type of target drone you are up against, but you realize that it is far too big a target for your system and you will not be able to do any damage to it, you might have to choose other options. In these instances, AI and machine learning can definitely aid in the way you pre-train the target database of enemy drones. First you identify the drone and then you do what is called inference, which is much faster than training
Drones on display at the inaugural NATO Edge, the NCI Agency’s new flagship event that launched in October (PHOTO: NCI Agency)
on the fly with the drone. In fact, at the TIE exercise I mentioned, there was a small start-up which intercepted drones with an optical recognition algorithm based on AI.
For the final engagement decision, you need both AI and humancontrolled options. If you have a slower target, you may be able to operate without AI, while if it’s a very hot threat, the only option may be to have an automatic engagement.
Q
How will this project help the NCI Agency enhance NATO capabilities?
A With any technology aspect, it is important to test out and experiment with solutions, to better understand strengths and weaknesses with respect to the goals of effectiveness, affordability and how personnel-intensive it is in development and operation. This information is then shared with the NATO Member States. One motivation for this is to enable an organization to be a smart buyer and know exactly what the technology can and can’t do.
In summary, I think what is really important is that we can engage academia, especially young students, and offer them invaluable and interesting opportunities in the STEM field. With this project, we offered the framework, provided some basic equipment and had regular meetings to guide them. We also went through some coding together. This was incredibly engaging for both the Agency participants and the students, and the team and I would certainly like to continue with these sorts of projects in the future. 89
