Countering a Single Small Unmanned Aerial System: A Kinetic Approach
Matthew L. Cooper, Seth D'Allessandris, Matthew Roehrig, Nicholas Muse, Michael L. Anderson, Sarah E. Galyon Dorman · AIAA SCITECH 2022 Forum · 2022
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-0884.vid Drones are becoming more popular and more accessible to the average person. With this increase in availability, the threat to our national security must be addressed. The goal of this research is to develop and prototype a kinetic means to take down a single drone, approaching head-on at high velocity and constant altitude. Background research was conducted to thoroughly understand the need, which included interviewing various potential end-users of the product. Through this process, it was determined that novel concepts would be highly valued, so numerous rounds of ideation were performed to develop a large initial set of solution concepts, to increase the probability of producing novel solutions. The selected concept was a dual-prop fixed wing plane with a first person view (FPV) camera feature, attached net gun that shoots a net at the hostile drone, and a triggering system. The system was analyzed subsystem-by-subsystem to identify potential failure modes and to verify that the final system would meet the quantified design requirements. Ultimately, a prototype was built and tested with a total cost under $3500. To prove initial feasibility, a constrained experiment was performed, which involved securing the blue-force aircraft to a cable and “flying” it along a fixed path. Under these conditions, the net gun was able to deploy successfully and entangle a surrogate target under conditions that are similar to those anticipated for future operations.