S. Vishnu Sharma
IIT Madras designs drones – There is a delightful news with regards to Indian Institute of Technology Madras ( IIT Madras ). Researchers at the prestigious educational institution developed an Artificial-Intelligence empowered drones that can counter rogue drones.
These drones are meant for armed forces and law enforcement agencies. The special point with regards to these drones is that they can detect rogue drones visually using Algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence and hack them to change their flight path or land safely. These can be of very good assistance to armed forces and law enforcing agencies.
Sources from IIT Madras say that this system can be controlled over the Internet and can navigate autonomously as compared to most existing drones that operate on ‘line of sight’ meaning the operator must keep the drone within their sight.
IIT Madras designs drones to counter rogue drones
Using the Internet to control the drones also allows for deploying a swarm of drones that can intelligently detect and track people, drones, vehicles and other objects.
The team who designed the system comprised Vasu Gupta, a final year B. Tech student, Department of Aerospace Engineering, IIT Madras and Rishabh Vashistha, a Project Associate working in RAFT Lab, Department of Aerospace Engineering, IIT Madras. Dr. Ranjith Mohan, Assistant Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering, IIT Madras was the mentor for the team.
IIT Madras designs drones
Ranjith Mohan said their current prototype is equipped to detect and track objects visually, precisely land and fly over internet. Their next step will be to conduct exhaustive tests on the system and ensure its reliability for catering to a wide range of demanding missions that pose challenge to our law enforcement and defence agencies.
The programmable nature of our aerial vehicles also opens up the possibility of swarming multiple vehicles to act as a team and accomplish a common mission, he said.
Vasu Gupta said the drone works by employing a software-defined radio and broadcasting spoofed GPS signals by making use of the ephemeris data of GNSS constellations. The target drone’s GPS sensor locks onto our fake radio station transmitting at a much higher power than the available satellite’s transmission power.
Following this, the drone generates fake GPS packets by mathematically modelling the time differences at the receiver’s end. Using four of such time differences, the GPS sensor calculates its 3D position and calibrates the rogue drones’ time to our spoofed clock. This way, we alter the latitude, longitude, altitude and time of the rogue drones, he said.
Rishabh Vashistha said algorithmically altering the 3D position allows us to move the target drone locally. Moreover, when a large variance is given in the spoofed GPS position, a fail safe (if any) is invoked at the target side which results in a safe landing of the target drone.
He further said they have tested this electronic countermeasure of ours against nearly all the civilian GPS receivers used by the UAV industry such as ublox, DJI inhouse GNSS and we have been able to take down the drones almost instantaneously within 4-5 seconds, he said.
The Team used an advancement of Kernelized Correlation Filters for tracking objects once they are detected and locked onto. Such tracking features work on visual sensors like cameras and CMOS without using radars and sonars, the latter of which generally do not provide much informative data.