DARPA's Aerial Dragnet program aims to track small UAS in urban setting
NewsSeptember 15, 2016
ARLINGTON, Va. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) officials announced it's Aerial Dragnet program, which aims to seek innovative technologies to provide persistent, wide-area surveillance of all unmanned aerial systems (UAS) - including small UAS - operating below 1,000 feet in a large city. The focus on the program is to protect military troops operating in an urban setting, the program has the potential to find civilian application to help protect U.S. metropolitan areas from UAS-enabled terrorist threats.
“Commercial websites currently exist that display in real time the tracks of relatively high and fast aircraft—from small general aviation planes to large airliners—all overlaid on geographical maps as they fly around the country and the world,” says Jeff Krolik, DARPA program manager. “We want a similar capability for identifying and tracking slower, low-flying unmanned aerial systems, particularly in urban environments.”
Aerial Dragnet seeks to surpass current systems that track small UAS by developing systems to adapt to the fundamental physics of small UAS in urban environments that could enable non-line-of-sight (NLOS) tracking and identification of a wide range of slow, low-flying threats.
DARPA officials explain that the program seeks an assortment of innovative approaches, but envisions a network of surveillance nodes, each providing coverage of a neighborhood-sized urban area. Using sensor technologies that can look over and between buildings, the surveillance nodes would maintain UAS tracks even when the craft disappear from sight around corners or behind objects. The output of the Aerial Dragnet system would be a continually updated common operational picture (COP) of the airspace at altitudes below where current aircraft surveillance systems can monitor, disseminated electronically to authorized users via secure data links.
The program will focus on combining low cost sensor hardware with software-defined signal processing hosted on existing UAS platforms. The program calls for teams with expertise in sensors, signal processing, and networked autonomy to join and meet this goal.
For more information, visit the Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) solicitation posted on FedBizOps http://go.usa.gov/xBx4A.
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