ART Wins International Anti-Drone Challenge
Virginia, 2016.
The MITRE Corporation, the American organization that manages federally funded research and development and that supports key Security and Defense institutions such as the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security, has announced the winners of its Countering Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) Challenge.
ADVANCED RADAR TECHNOLOGIES products have been awarded the Best Detection and Determination System and Best End-to-End System, in a competition against the proposals of 42 international consortiums, including industry leaders such as Lockheed Martin.
ART Midrange DS radar and ART HMI Command & Control software provided the detection, tracking and overall integration capabilities within DroneRANGER, the system presented by the American company Van Cleve and Associates. The interception capability was provided by SCG’s Drone-Defense Jammer, a high performance application specific jammer, automatically controlled and managed by ART HMI software.
The MITRE C-UAS Challenge asked innovators from around the world to identify solutions that could:
- Detect small drones (under 5 lbs.) during flight over urban area and determine which ones were threats based on a geographic location, flight trajectory and behavior.
- Interdict small UAS that were classified as threats by forcing them to be recovered intact in a safe area.
The MITRE Challenge Team chose 8 finalists from among the 42 applicants. The finalists’ systems were evaluated against the same live flight evaluation protocol. To emulate the challenge of protecting urban critical assets, the tests took place in the urban warfare training area at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia.
During the tests simulated attacks were executed without previous notice to the participants. In addition, non-hostile drones were also present and used to evaluate the discrimination capability of each candidate system.
ART Midrange DS radar and ART HMI Command & Control Software achieved the best overall score in the challenge, detecting the hostile drones at the maximum range and with the best precision and discriminating them from the non-hostile ones, even in the most demanding exercises that involved multiple simultaneous attacks.