Curious Conversations, a Research Podcast

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Travis

What makes drones so hard to defend against? Drones can be a tremendous amount of fun. If you've ever gotten one as a holiday gift and spent the day terrorizing your relatives, you know this. But it's a lot less fun to think about how they could potentially terrorize our country. And if you've paid attention to any of the conflicts over the past few years, you know that's a real possibility. So what is it about these devices that makes them such a threat? And why is it so challenging to defend against it? Well, thankfully, Virginia Tech's Austin Phoenix is an expert in this very subject.

Austin

they're very small.

And so we're used to building sensors and systems that can detect big systems, but these are kind of small and hard to see and hear.

The other piece is they're also really cheap.

And it's that real combination that makes them makes them very dangerous and a kind of a scary new capability.

Travis

Austin is an associate research professor and the director of the Mission Systems Division of the Virginia Tech National Security Institute. He's also the leader of a new Center Virginia Tech recently stood up with the support of the United States Army to test and research these emerging technologies to really help us better understand this challenging landscape and develop some plans for what we can do about it. So he shared a lot of fascinating insights and also made me feel a little bit better about the future with all this emerging tech.

I'm Travis Williams and this is Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

Travis

I want to talk to you about drones and drones in the defense space. And I thought maybe a good place to start this conversation out is simply to help me get an understanding of kind of what the landscape looks like right now with the types of drones that we're really talking about when it comes to defense.

Austin

Yeah, so so drones or unmanned aerial systems, UAS, are kind of entering the battle space in a new way. as you've probably seen in your own life, they're these cheap, flyable, cool drones that exist in the marketplace for commercial use. watching TV of late, you've seen commercials and television shot from these drone cameras. They're becoming a larger and larger part of our economy. And

One of the key areas that we're trying to address here at Virginia Tech is how do we understand how these introduce new threats and challenges to protect critical infrastructure for local police? you know, a great example is Lane Stadium, right? How do we ensure that unauthorated unauthorized flights over Lane Stadium aren't happening? and in the military, if you're, you know, keeping up with the news, you've seen a lot of drones used in Ukraine and Russia war has been a really incredible and rapid enhancement in the technology in those areas, both from you know, kind of how they're used, but also the fundamental technology. And then, you know, in the Iran conflict, there it's been a large portion of kind of the discussion. And that's really because drones and and UAS introduced two key new challenges. One is that they're very small.

And so we're used to building sensors and systems that can detect aircraft, you know, big systems, but these are kind of small and hard to see and hear. And so a new set of detection technologies are required for these smaller systems. You know, you think about it, they're about the size of a bird. And so, how can you build sensors that are robust that can detect a drone that looks fairly similar to a bird, especially as they get smaller and and the birds get bigger. but that's a key challenge. The other piece is they're also really cheap. And so that enables you to kind of use and lose them and kind of throw them away, you know, use them as a throwaway system. And that introduces some some pretty you know difficult challenges from a defensive perspective, because instead of you know, a country building a couple planes a year, you can see millions of these. Entering the battle space in a given time. And it's that real combination that makes them makes them very dangerous and and a kind of a scary new capability.

Travis

Yeah, it's really interesting to me because it seems like it this is a one of those it's an instance where the technology is almost got more affordable and almost cheaper and smaller, but then more dangerous because of that. I don't know how often that happens, but it's very interesting because of that.

Austin

Yeah. I mean the the technological advancement we've seen. I mean, I bought a little quadcopter in grad school many years ago and and flew that around in the early days. And even then, you know, some of the the flight assisted autonomy that it had was pretty incredible. There were beginner modes that if I pointed it in a direction, it would just kind of slowly maneuver that way, or advanced modes where you can just, you know do backflips and all these things. I I remember it had a button on it where it would just do a flip. It would just, you know, do a flip in the air for you. And in the last decade we've seen that, you know, kind of the control technology, the ability for it to to fly advance really quickly. And that makes, you know, these kinds of systems you know, much, much scarier. And then also just, you know, we're seeing them everywhere.

Travis

Well, along with drones, are there other emerging technologies that are are coming alongside these that are also kind of helping empower them to to be more dangerous?

Austin

Yeah, really good question. So I think the the obvious one is autonomy. It's affecting a lot of different areas of our of our world today, but the ability of leveraging some autonomous systems on these drones to enable a single individual to give directions to a drone and it figure it out, or for a single individual to be able to fly multiples to many of these drones, assisted by that autonomy, is of of great, you know, multiplicative.

Performative factors and really makes them far more dangerous. And so as we look to you know what we've seen at in high level of tax and what we may expect to see in the next five years is systems that are opt operating, you know, without anyone actually touching any controls, doing pre-programmed missions, and really able to make pretty high-level decisions on their own, which is a really scary future. We're not there yet, luckily and there's a lot of good work being done to develop counter systems to those kind of technologies. But it's a very different challenge when you know I can cut a communications link of a drone back to its hub, or I can diminish its ability to communicate and degrade its performance. But if it's a system that you can kind of tell it to complete a mission and it has some autonomous behaviors, some autonomous decision making, and it can go complete that independently, that's where things start to get very scary.

Travis

Yeah, I would imagine it would also be a little bit harder to maybe track down the source, maybe, of some of those drones.

Austin

Exactly.

Austin

Yeah. Hit hit a button, have it launch, it flies and you're driving the opposite direction is a is a real real worry.

Travis

Yeah, well you mentioned some about the cost, I'm gonna call it cost effectiveness of these these drones, 'cause it seems like for you know nefarious actors this would be a very cost effective pursuit. But maybe on the other side of that, how do we balance that or maybe what potential challenges are when it comes to just kind of the money side of of this equation?

Austin

Yeah, so manufacturing these systems is is really cheap. you know, you can go out and and buy a hobbyist drone from DJI or China, these these places that is really impressive. They're great for fun little video sessions. You can they're they're pretty impressive technology that's out there today and they're really low cost. I think the part of the cost equation that's much scarier is

If we want to be able to understand and know where all the drones are in the air above Lane Stadium, how many sensors do we need? How far away do we need to be able to detect a small lightweight drone from a you know hobbyist trying to take a picture of Lane Stadium during Enter Sandman or a nefarious actor? You know, the number of sensing systems that we're going to need To be able to detect, track, identify, and then hopefully disrupt those kinds of nefarious actors is very high. And so we're doing research actively now in trying to reduce the cost of that sensing systems by leveraging multiple sensors and doing fusion of those systems, leveraging both AI and physics-based modeling to help inform and improve the performance of these sensing systems. But that's a really key challenge.

if you're looking at I you know, if we live in a world where we have a we want one of these sensors at every critical infrastructure site in the US, that just means we're gonna have to build hundreds of thousands of these sensing systems and deploy them. And that can be, you know, very costly.

Travis

Yeah. Well, we've talked some about kind of the potential dangers. What do we do if there is a a nefarious actors? Like what options do are we do we currently have to maybe mitigate a potential threat?

Austin

Yeah. Th so in the US, you know, we're we're lucky enough that we've got some good tools, you know, in our belt. a lot of them are really about disrupting the connection between the drone and its operator. and that's really the method we do that. There are a couple ways. cyber attacks, so can we hack that drone and communicate with it and tell it new directions and new things to do? Are there ways to just simply overwhelm Communication channels, so it can no longer receive or transmit information to its operator. but as we look in the near term, a lot of these drones are actually built with a have systems on board that are telling you where their operator is, who they are, and what they're doing. And so when we look at near-term threats for police officers and others, having a system that is able to listen to those those signatures of the UAS that's emitting and saying, here's where I am and who I am, and here's where my operator is, and being able to respond to those kind of novice threat sets where you've just got a hobbyist operating maybe too close to something they shouldn't. and so there's a a wide array of technology sets in that vein. And those really are enabled by kind of industry built-in backdoors, for example, where the cops are able to say, a drone's in the wrong place, I see it, and I have the ability to tell it to land or fly back home. As we look towards more advanced threats, there's an enormous array of technology that people are looking at to help defend against these systems. there's this train of you know, detect, track, identify, and then mitigate. And in that mitigation bucket, one is you know, remove the operator jam it, intercept it, cyber attack it as one set. Then there's a lot of kinetic options, whether it's either let me shoot a net at it, that fall into this kind of you know bucket of low collateral defeat. So things that aren't going to put anyone else at risk, methods that can take a drone down without, you know, requiring a lot of regulatory authority. But one of the key challenges we have in the US is that you really don't have a lot of authority to shoot down a drone yet. And this is a larger problem that is hopefully being addressed by our representatives to help provide a broader set of capabilities to mitigate and prevent these these drones. But when you start talking about more military applications, lasers and directed energy are real key. But at the end of the day, the methodology that everyone is is really running towards is a multi-layered defense structure where you have an ability to detect drones very far out. You have methods to try jamming, jamming the ones that are susceptible to jamming, using directed energy like lasers and microwaves, when there's you know at a certain level to defend others, and then leveraging the more expensive or other methodologies like kineticill drone on drone. Or nets to kind of fill in the gaps. And through these multiple layers, there's a lot of hope that as we continue to advance each of those layers, that we're able to build an effective layered defense against these systems and really ensure that we can protect a given area from a complex threat.

Travis

Yeah, it almost sounds like a triaged approach to drones in the sky, starting with kind of like the e you know, the easiest thing, and as it gets more complicated, we we want all these different steps we can escalate to as the situation requires.

Austin

Yeah, exactly.

Travis

well, I know one of the things that you're involved with is helping launch the the counter UAS center at Virginia Tech, which is really exciting because everything we just talked about, I feel like is is exactly what you all are diving into with this center. So What can you tell us about the about the center?

Austin

Yeah, so the Counter US Testing and Research Center is this really awesome collaboration that's happening here at Virginia Tech that's really enabled by both Virginia Tech leadership, which we've gotten great support for, and then the National Security Institute and the Mid Atlantic Aviation Partnership. So the National Security Institute brings some unique skills in communications systems development, hardware design for the national security space And MAAP really enables us to do that test. They're one of the nine FAA approved UAS test sites in the US. And it's an incredible asset to have here at Virginia Tech. And so this collaboration is working to build a facility at Kelland Farms here in Blacksburg where we can fly drones, operate them, test them against counter UAS systems. And we've built a sensors distributed sensor network a bunch of drones that we can really exercise and test in very conventional ways these counter UAS systems, but also developing technologies to help accelerate and improve our testing capabilities by building out emitters, both mobile and stationary, to kind of complicate the environment and enable us to kind of make Kentland Farms look like somewhere else. So you know, Kentland Farms hopefully is not, you know, the right battle space environment that we may expect to see in the future but we can pump in additional RF energy to make it look like an urban environment or some battle space of the future. And we can pump in acoustic energy to really complicate the testing environment for these UAS. There are two other key pieces to the center that really enable this kind of holistic testing and and evaluation and research. One is an indoor facility where we have an anecdote chamber, which enables us to do things that we're just not able to do outdoors. So That enables us to test mitigation methods and other things that we can't do outside. But we also get to collect signatures off these drones, understand how it emits and the acoustics coming off of it, what it looks like, and really characterize these systems and build algorithms to help us detect, track, and identify them. We also have a virtual environment. And so this virtual environment enables us to take data from our indoor test lab Where we collect really high fidelity acoustic signatures, really high fidelity emissions data, and we can place it in a virtual environment that looks exactly like Kenland Farms. And so then we can fly it in that virtual environment, leverage that both to help us design how we should test these systems, but also to kind of push the bounds of what we can test and have 10, 15, 100 of these drones and systems in the air at a given time in that virtual environment. Where that's difficult or expensive to do actually out in testing, right? That'll that's a lot of pilots, that's a lot of capability. But once we have that virtual environment, we can take an understanding of how are those 40 drones operating, how are those many drones emitting, and we can go to that outdoor test environment. And while we only may have 10, 15 drones in the air, we can complicate that environment and make the counter UAS system see more than. And so the idea here is through this coupling between our outdoor test center and Kentland Farms, our indoor signature collection laboratory, and then this virtual environment, we're able to really extend the range of where we can test and what we can test, which will really enable us to work with academia to do really fundamental research on what kind of drones, what kind of comms, what kind of systems are need to be developed for both counter and as we manufacture our own drones. All the way up to we're you know looking to deploy a system in you know for either the police or the military. And we may not be able to test that last step. There are test centers that the government owns that are really well suited for you know really complex engagements, but we can do a ton of the testing to mature the systems, understand how they'll respond before you have to go to one of those much more expensive, much harder to get onto government test sites. And so through this, we're really working to both partner with academia, the government, to help them evaluate and develop new counter UAS systems, but also really working with industry. We want to become a trusted partner with those industry, industry manufacturers and really be helping them improve their capabilities so they can come to us and understand, okay, you know, if I was going to invest in a new sensor system, which of these would complement my technology the best, what are the fundamental limitations from a physics perspective to my current system, and how do I advance it so that we can just rapidly accelerate the speed at which we're developing these technologies?

Travis

That sounds like you all are doing so much in there. I am just so curious because you said one thing with the outdoor facility. You can use energy to make Kentland Farms appear as like a different environment, like an urban environment.

Austin

And so yeah, so it's it's visually no. We we've got our own we've got our own limitations. but when we look at the acoustics and we look at radar frequency energy, we are able to collect the acoustics and RF that comes off these drones in our indoor facility. We can then export that into our virtual environment, understand what's happening, and then take that measurements and recreate them. In that outdoor environment. And so whether that's as simple as, you know, we want to make Kentland Farms look like downtown Blacksburg and we make you know replicate the emissions of a bunch of cell phones and you know car radios and and all that kind of energy, or if we want to make it an urban environment or we want to kind of tune it for the environment that we need, we have some knobs that we can turn to help complicate the system and really push the limits of a of a detection algorithm by complicating that environment and understanding, okay, you're you're really great at detecting five drones in the air, but what happens as we start to make this a little more difficult?

Travis

Yeah, that sounds like you all have created the ultimate kind of drone playground for this type stuff. it sounds really exciting. I'm curious for for you as somebody that studies this, what are you most excited about with that getting off the ground?

Austin

Yeah,

Travis

It's the hardest question I've asked you.

Austin

Yeah. No, it's a good one though, so I think there are two things I'm most excited about in this. One is our undergraduate student engagement. last year we had nearly 50 undergraduate students engaged at some level in the research that we were doing, whether that was building unique drones, working on unique sensors, helping to support us build out this test site has been an incredible opportunity, and this gives a great opportunity for MAAP And NSI and Virginia Tech to really build future leaders in the space by exposing them to the unique challenges here. The other thing I'm I'm really excited about personally is we've got some testing done with some industry partners where I'm gonna really put a big smile on my face is when we have demonstrated that like substantial performance increase for their system based on working together as a partnership. I'm really excited for them to, you know, our initial testing, you know, their their system performs really well and showing that that methodical improvement in capability so that we're really delivering capability to local, federal police, the border as well as our Department of War partners to really get systems on the ground that are, you know, that we've played that small part in making a little bit better.

Travis

Well, that's awesome. I'm really excited about seeing you do all of those things. and just the whole project because it just sounds great.

Austin

Thank you so much. And I've really got to give an enormous shout out to the the entire team. The only way you can do these really big efforts is not just researchers, not just administrative, but the government relations team, MAAP has been an incredible partner through this. It really is an enabler for us to expand our capabilities. And then of course, leadership at Virginia Tech is key. And then on the NSI team, we've had a huge group of really dedicated researchers putting in nights and weekends to deliver value to this to this community and to the warfighter and really benefiting the whole community. And so, you know, really happy to be in a a role where I get to talk about these kind of things. but you know, as as we all know, it's it's really my team that does all the work and really is the one that's delivering on this capability. So gotta give them their due shout out to say the least. So these kind of big, you know, multi-institute, you know, wide efforts are are a really great challenge that I'm really happy to say that Virginia Tech at large stepped up step up to to deliver on facilities, helping us build systems at a at a research timeline. You know, new capabilities, hardware out on on a new location has been really awesome to see everyone line up and say, how can how can we help make this happen?

And so a a really success, a real success story for Virginia Tech at large. And I'm very hopeful that this will be a a real shining, shining example of what Virginia Tech can do when pointed in the right direction.