Using a Drone Swarm/Team for Safety, Security and Protection Against Unauthorized Drones

• There is an increased need for protection against unauthorized entry of drones as there has been an increased number of reports of UAV’s entering restricted areas. In this paper we explore an approach of using a swarm/team of drones that are able to cooperate, to autonomously engage and disable one or more unauthorized drones entering a restricted area. In our approach, we have investigated technologies for distributed decision-making and task allocation in real-time, in a dynamic simulated environment and developed descriptive models for how such technologies may be exploited in a mission designed for a drone swarm. This includes the definition of discrete tasks, how they interact and how they are composed to form such a mission, as well as the realization and execution of these tasks using machine learning models combined with behaviour trees. To evaluate our approach, we use a simulated environment for mission execution where relevant KPI’s related to the design of the mission have been used to measure how efficient our approach is in deterring or incapacitating unauthorized drones. The evaluation has been performed using Monte-Carlo simulations on a batch of randomized scenarios and measures of effectiveness has been used to measure each scenario instance and later compiled into a final assessment for the main scenario as well as each ingoing task. The results show a mission success in 93% of the simulated scenarios. Of these 93%, 58% of the scenarios resulted in the threat being neutralized and in 35% of the scenarios the threat was driven away from the critical area. We believe that the application of such measurements aids to validate the applicability of this capability in a real-world scenario and in order to assert the relevance of these parameters, future validations in real-world operational scenarios are warranted.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Robotteknik och automation (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Robotics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Drone swarm

Drones

Protection

Safety

Security

Decision making

Intelligent systems

Monte Carlo methods

Petroleum reservoir evaluation

Decision task

Distributed decision making

Distributed-decision makings

Real- time

Security and protection

Simulated environment

Task allocation

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)