Whether it's Amazon using drones to deliver packages or the Olympic skiing program enabling automated drone followers, commercial drones are becoming ubiquitous. Many applications have benefited from the advent of drones, including the broadcasting of sporting events and the automation of wildlife refuge research. Based on powerful and intelligent software, drones are becoming less expensive, easier to operate, and have a longer range. As with other high-tech technologies, violators try to use drones for illegal purposes.

　　Such incidents have led to the need for drone defense systems, which have been created. The system has evolved rapidly with the increasing frequency and sophistication of threats to counter violators. Most UAV defense systems utilize a variety of technologies to detect and neutralize threats. These systems will use both active and passive radars, with some systems utilizing optical detection techniques. Countermeasures are also varied and include non-destructive communications interception, GPS jamming, and destructive measures such as missile shoot-downs or high-powered directional laser cannon shoot-downs.

　　Anti-drone can be divided into two parts from the functional point of view: drone detection and detection and drone countermeasures. Drone detection and probing technologies mainly include: radio-based drone detection and probing, radar-based drone probing+, and photoelectricity-based drone probing. All three technologies have now been applied to security, event security, border and classified area drone protection. Drone countermeasures Anti-drone technology is mainly divided into three categories One is the interference blocking category, which is mainly realized through signal interference, acoustic interference and other technologies. The second is the direct destruction category, including the use of laser weapons, countering drones with drones and so on. The third is the monitoring and control category, which is mainly realized through hijacking radio control and other means.

　　UAV Defense Systems Need to Address Technological Developments and SWaP Challenges

　　Many new, smarter commercial drones are introduced every year, and the command and control (C2) and navigation systems they carry are becoming more sophisticated. It is difficult to implement C2 countermeasures when the drone is not under the direct control of the pilot; this is when spoofing or jamming is often used to disrupt or turn off GPS signals. Active remotely piloted UAVs, on the other hand, can offer a variety of communication methods, such as basic analog modulation as well as highly secure digital links based on encrypted commands. Traditional high-power jamming techniques have often been used in the past; however, this practice can be quite disruptive to parties of interest and may jeopardize covert operations. It is quite a challenge to make individual defense systems flexible enough to adapt to different C2 jamming methods.

　　How to keep up with changing technologies and rapidly deploy new threat countermeasures? Because traditional in-house defense program development cycles are very long and not responsive to the needs of the times, many systems are beginning to turn to commercial off-the-shelf technologies to accelerate deployment so that system designers can focus on researching threat countermeasures rather than hardware implementations.

　　Additionally, while base protection is important, many military operators need to deploy effective countermeasure solutions on vehicles in remote locations. Often times, their military vehicles cannot accommodate full-size radar systems (including cameras and disruptive countermeasure devices). And mobile systems must be stealthy and able to operate for extended periods of time on missions; ultimately it all comes down to SWaP (size, weight, and power consumption). Selecting a platform that can scale from prototyping to deployment and meet SWaP and radio performance standards is critical.

National Instruments Helps SkySafe Develop Drone Defense System

　　In response to technological developments and SWaP challenges, based on NI's commercial SDR technology, SkySafe has developed a corresponding system by combining NI SDRs with open source software, allowing SkySafe to quickly adapt to changing threats simply by deploying new algorithms, dramatically reducing the time and cost of deploying new capabilities.

　　Powered by NI, the SkySafe UAV defense system combines the NI Ettus Research USRP X310 SDR, the GNU Radio open-source framework and RFNoC, a flexible FPGA framework. The flexibility provided by the USRP X310 makes it ideally suited for rapidly developing, highly adaptable, low-power mobile applications.

　　We are excited to have a partner like NI on board," said Scott Torborg, CTO of SkySafe, "The NI Ettus Research USRP X310 is the only commercially available SDR that combines openness with the raw RF and DSP functionality needed to meet the rapidly evolving demands of UAV threat countermeasures. In addition to this, environmental protection and system robustness were both considered when designing the solution from the outset, and NI's support for retrofitting the USRP X310 was key to meeting the requirements of the SkySafe environment.