Drone Mitigation System

2018 ELE Engineering Design Project (FM06)

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Faculty Lab Coordinator

Farah Mohammadi

Topic Category

Intelligent Instrumentation

Preamble

Today’s commercially available drones can fly for miles and can take video, pictures and audio from a target. These drones mostly work in usual unlicensed spectrum of 2.4GHz or 5GHz similar to Wi-Fi. Many of them use frequency hopping to prevent jamming and to improve Signal to Noise (S/N) ratio. The required system must first listen to these unlicensed frequency range and detect drones that are communicating in this frequency range. Then it must track the frequency hopping and must send a pulse of noise for each hopped frequency to reduce S/N ratio so that the drone can’t communicate with its controller.

Objective

- To design, develop and implement a prototype device with necessary radios and computer interfaces as well as proper GUI interface that detects and displays commercially available drones within a pre-defined range. The system must have capability to jam the communication channel between the drone and the drone controller with the aim of landing the drone or forcing the drone to leave. The jamming must have the capability to be triggered by user or automatically be triggered by software whenever a drone is detected. - To design the software so that the system have the capability to detect friendly drones and make sure they are not jammed in the process of jamming unwanted drones. - To design a portable system, which can fit in a backpack, and consumes low power using battery. -To provide report of the daily activity to the user via GUI interface.

Partial Specifications

• Design and develop a radio-frequency-based detect & disrupt counter-drone mitigation system;
• Design and develop the hardware system and required interfaces;
• Specify the characteristics of the RX/TX radio and find proper off the shelve radios that match the required characteristics. May use Software Defined Radios (SDR);
• Specify the characteristics of the required computer;
• Specify the characteristics of the required amplifiers, power supply, interfaces, etc and find off the shelve products that match those requirements;
• Specify and design the portable, hardened enclosure;
• Specify and write the required software for detection, interruption and display of information and reporting;
• Design the system to operate in Multi-Frequency Support: 915 MHz, 2.4 and 5.8 GHz and other frequency bands;
• Design the system to be able to have Multi-Drone Mitigation support. Simultaneous Mitigation of Multiple Drones on Multiple Frequencies;
• Design and implement the Graphical User Interface;
• Design and implement the Remote Cloud Access.

Suggested Approach

- Use off the shelve products such as SDR, laptop, power supply;
- Use AWS or similar cloud service;
- Run simulations to endure the system works;
- Investigate the frequency characteristics and signatures of drones available in the market.

Group Responsibilities

- Literature review on drones, frequency hopping, SDR, power saving, unlicensed spectrum; - Prepare a technical report and present the results at the end of the program.

Student A Responsibilities

To design, develop and implement the hardware prototype (Radio, CPU, power supply, Interfaces).

Student B Responsibilities

To design, develop and implement software and algorithm for detection and jamming of drone communication channel.

Student C Responsibilities

To design, develop GUI interface, Cloud services and portable enclosures and batteries.

Course Co-requisites

Modulation, Wireless signals and fading, Software, GUI and Cloud services