DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals for persistent, wide-area surveillance of small unmanned aerial systems (UASs) in urban terrain on a city-wide scale. Proposals are solicited for a scalable network of sensors on aerial platforms performing threat-agnostic UAS detection, classification, and tracking by looking over and into complex terrain.
Aerial Dragnet seeks to perform persistent wide-area surveillance of multiple small unmanned aerial systems (UASs) in urban terrain on a city-wide scale. Small UASs are rapidly becoming low-cost aerial platforms for hostile reconnaissance, targeting, and weapon delivery. Unlike traditional air targets, small UASs:
- 1) fly at low altitudes (e.g., < 400 ft) which make them easily hidden by complex terrain,
- move at slow speeds (e.g., < 90 kts) which make them difficult to differentiate from other movers, and
- are small in size (e.g., < 55 lbs.) making them difficult to sense.
In future urban battlegrounds, U.S. forces will be placed at risk by small UAS which use buildings and naturally-occurring motion of the clutter to make surveillance impractical using current approaches. The rapid proliferation of commercial UAS with increasing endurance and payload capacity drives the need for a future urban aerial surveillance system that can detect, track, and classify many different UAS types at longer ranges in urban terrain.
Current counter-UAS approaches either:
- require line-of-sight (LOS) target viewing geometries not possible in urban terrain, or
- exploit fragile vulnerabilities of commercial UASs obsoleted by rapid adaption.
This program seeks to develop systems for threat-agnostic non-line-of-sight (NLOS) surveillance which exploit and adapt to the fundamental physics of the threat and the urban environment. To achieve wide-area performance, proposals are solicited for a scalable network of surveillance nodes, each consisting of sensors mounted on a persistent unmanned aerial platform that can sense over and into complex terrain. The resulting system will produce real-time situational awareness of the airspace in urban areas below altitudes covered by conventional air surveillance systems.