The rapid development of unmanned miniature flight systems is accelerating the exponential growth of the commercial sector and builds an asymmetric threat situation as a potential means of attack against a background of inefficient countermeasures. Current technology forecasts indicate that in the next evolutionary step, flight systems will offer even more functionalities, especially regarding their autonomy. Considering the increasing change in the security policy threat situation, it is of crucial importance to adapt the threat scenarios by considering unmanned air systems as potential means of attack.

In this context, the detection, tracking and countering of drones is an important task of public security. To be able to counter the threat in a specific manner, self-organized swarms of drones are used in USKIT for air surveillance in addition to the existing distributed and networked ground sensor system. Intervention measures examine both cooperative physical and intelligence measures.

In this context, USKIT provides the following results:

• Technology for cooperative aerial reconnaissance in a swarm network by a swarm of fixed-wing aircraft with multimodal sensors and networking for cooperative airspace reconnaissance.
• Technology for self-organisation of a heterogeneous swarm network through methods and procedures for self-organised decentralised management of a scalable heterogeneous drone swarm.
• Technology for intervening in the swarm network with cooperative measures.

Project manager
D.I.(FH) Christoph Sulzbachner, MSc.
AIT Austrian Institute of Technology

Further/additional project partner(s)
Austria Institut für Europa- und Sicherheitspolitik (AIES)
Bundesministerium für Landesverteidigung
Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH
Joby Austria GmbH
Lakeside Labs GmbH
Twins GmbH

Contact
D.I.(FH) Christoph Sulzbachner, MSc.
Giefinggasse 4, 1210 Wien

+43 664 825 1342

Christoph.sulzbachner@ait.ac.at 
https://www.ait.ac.at/ueber-das-ait/center/center-for-vision-automation-control