IIT-M’s Army-ready drones to fight rival ones

A release from IIT-M on Thursday said this system could be of invaluable assistance to law enforcement agencies, security services and the Armed forces to secure air space over critical civilian and military installations from surveillance by rogue drones.

‘’It can track down rogue drones visually, hack into their GPS navigation system, following which the target drone is forced to change its flight path or land safely,’’ it said.

A major advantage of this drone is that it can be controlled with the internet and can navigate autonomously as compared to most existing drones that operate on ‘line of sight’-meaning the operator must keep the drone within their sight.

Using the internet to control the drones also allows for deploying a swarm of drones that could intelligently detect and track people, drones, vehicles and other objects, the release said.

This system was designed by a team comprising final year B Tech aerospace engineering student Vasu Gupta and Rishabh Vashistha, a project associate working in RAFT Lab at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, IIT Madras.

Aerospace engineering department assistant professor Dr Ranjith Mohan, who mentored the team, said that the current prototype is equipped to detect and track objects visually, precisely land and fly over with the help of intern et.

He said, ‘’Our next step will be to conduct exhaustive tests on the system and ensure its reliability for catering to a wide range of demanding missions that pose challenge to our law enforcement and defence agencies’’.

‘’The programmable nature of our aerial vehicles also opens up the possibility of swarming multiple vehicles to act as a team and accomplish a common mission,’’ Dr Ranjith said.

The researchers designed a visual-based tracking system using Deep Neural Networks (Artificial Intelligence) to secure airspaces and land stretches efficiently by employing a swarm of drones.

The motion detection algorithms were powered by AI and could detect motion even in dark conditions without the need of an IR (infrared) camera.

Vasu Gupta said, “The drone works by employing a software-defined radio and broadcasting spoofed GPS signals by making use of the ephemeris data of GNSS constellations. The target drone’s GPS sensor locks onto our fake radio station transmitting at a much higher power than the available satellite’s transmission power.’’

Following this, the drone generates fake GPS packets by mathematically modelling the time differences at the receiver’s end, he said.

‘’Using four of such time differences, the GPS sensor calculates its 3D position and calibrates the rogue drones’ time to our spoofed clock. This way, we alter the latitude, longitude, altitude and time of the rogue drones’’, he said.