Home Solutions Aerospace and Defense Radar and Electronic Warfare Electronic Warfare System Deployment Designing and Deploying Counter-Unmanned Air Systems

Designing and Deploying Counter-Unmanned Air Systems

With commercial drone usage on the rise around the world, taking measures to protect against unmanned air systems (UAS) is critical. Whether for preventing negligent or reckless drone usage from harming the public at airports or other crowded places or defending against intentional damage of civilian or military assets, systems must be put in place to detect and disable threats. These systems need to be:

 

  • Adaptable to address new UAS communications protocols as they evolve in frequency and complexity without requiring new hardware
  • Flexible and easy-to-use software and firmware environments with rapid reconfiguration, to deliver fielded capability to counter new threats
  • Low-size, weight, and power (SWaP), especially if deployed on mobile platforms​

COTS SDR for Designing and Deploying Drone Defense Systems

  • USRP software defined radio (SDR) devices provide a flexible RF architecture to rapidly design, prototype, and deploy wireless systems with custom signal processing.
  • The USRP Hardware Driver (UHD) is a user-space library that runs on a general-purpose processor and communicates with and controls the USRP device family.
  • RF Network on Chip (RFNoC) abstracts the complexity of programming FPGAs on USRP SDRs, easing the development of inline signal processing for drone detection and interdiction.

Solution Advantages

  • Flexible RF architecture for rapidly designing and prototyping wireless systems with custom signal processing

  • Accelerated development platform for rapidly prototyping new capability with open-source software

  • Lab-to-field transition eased by deploying SDRs into mission systems to perform detection, jamming, and spoofing of comms links

  • Integration into a deployed drone defense system alongside kinetic and electronic effectors, with data fed into situational awareness tools

  • Ruggedization options available from NI partners, preparing systems for harsh conditions such as extreme temperature, shock, and vibration

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