This post is a quick recap of Global Drone Security Network (GDSN) #3.
We are honoured to host presentation from Garik Markarian from Rinicom Ltd. If you haven't watched his talk "Counter-UAV Command, Control and Coordination Strategy for First Responders" please visit our YouTube channel.
Counter-UAV Command, Control and Coordination Strategy for First Responders
Okay. So on behalf of myself and Andrew, I'd like to thank you for inviting, it's both a pleasure and honor to be here. And I already took something useful from the previous presentation and I hope you guys can find something useful in ours. To tell about who we are, where we are. So I'll talk about myself. I'm Garik Markarian. Had the pleasure to be Professor of communication that Lancaster University and also the founder and chairman of Rinicom Limited, it's a UK company. I'm sure you already had a lot of discussions about the drone, how they've been used, how they could be used and what security threats they're obsessing about. I will not be talking about this. I will say what we think about it. And we as a company, Rinicom, we are in the Counter UAV sector for the last four or five years, we focus purely on the optical detection, tracking and classification, the sensors. And this is basically to utilize our expertise in Visual Analytics and artificial intelligence. And why the optical because as we know, all the sensors are important, and you cannot solve the problem with just one sensor. Everyone agrees what you need to have is multiple assessors to complement each other. But the final, we say the final decision, it's like a last mile in communications, you need to have an optical system to see the drone to identify, to classify, and to do forensic investigation after that. So I just took two quotes that we used before. Conventionally, everyone thinks, well, the optical system is just a camera, and what you need, you need the radar or the RF detection to detect the drones. And then once you detect you point manually, search with a camera and zooming into the drone. Which was the case until recently, but not anymore. The problem started when people started deploying the anti drone systems, they realize that the illegal drones, they don't fly very often, but what you need, you need to have a 24-7 operator sitting and looking to the sky and manually operating the system all over. So then they came up with requirements to have this automated and this is where we came. So we as a company, we introduced basically AI based systems with the optical detection. In our system, we take the AI artificial intelligence to control the systems rather than the operators. And the human operators only come to the equation when the drone is classified as a rogue drone or a dangerous drone and the decision needs to be made what kind of countermeasure to engage? Should it be the jammer or the sniper or kinetic or the eagle or whatever. So what we did, we introduced the system, just one of the system, which call the SkyPatriot. It's patented, and the system from what we believe it's quite advanced. A lot of people tell us what they want is the best on the market and it is proven by the numerous installations, our system has installed in some really critical installations, I can say that it's installed in Heathrow Airport, I also can say what it's installed in a number of prisons, in the military basis. And it also installed in the far east as well. So it's quite a well accepted the system, the performance, what we are getting with the standard Bosch cameras, as you can see is about 1.8 kilometers for classification and three kilometers for the detection. But if you use the better, more expensive cameras, obviously, the range will increase accordingly. And this is just a simple diagram showing what it's not just the camera, but there is a lot of behind it, including like the multiple modules and analytics. I won't go into the details, I will just simply show what we can do. So for example, we on the left hand side, where you see like some trees and everything, that's the test area, what we are using. On this screen, you can see the drone, which is a target 94. But we also can see some birds and some movements on the trees and so on. So the system detects the drones, but it ignores other moving targets. Then we have a classifier which is on the right hand side. And then the result of classification, we see the target, it's classified as a drone, and it's plotted on a map. We also can do this for birds. So we can detect and classify the birds, which is quite important for many airports as well. And we can detect and classify the drones and the birds at the same time. So we can give like pretty accurate information about who is flying in the protected area. And in our latest results, also what they can do is like while everyone is interesting to find the drones, then for making decision what countermeasure to apply, it will be good to know what this drone is carrying carrying. If it is just a camera, it's one thing and I always say, in some cases, you want to hide from the camera. But in some cases, you can come out and if it's a paparazzi, and you're desperate for publicity you may come out. But you really want to know if your drone is carrying something like in the videos from the previous presentation. And today, to the best of our knowledge, there is no system that can say, Well, this is a rogue drone, and this is carrying something dangerous. We actually have the new addition to our solution, which is a payload detection. And it's not just simply zooming the camera to the drone and to see if it is carrying anything. Then with the help of AI we analyze the drone movements and by comparing with the movements of loaded drone or with unloaded drone, while we cannot say what it is carrying because it's impossible, it's inside the box, but we can say and predict, estimate the weight of that payload, what the drone is carrying. Which is useful in making the decisions. One thing that I also wanted to talk today is, in the past few years, there have been a lot of discussions about Counter UAV systems and how it is important and so on and so forth. Today, I personally know about 220, 230 systems from about 150 suppliers, who provide different Counter UAS systems for different applications. The problem is, as there is no single use, there is also no single kind of type of application. And there is always the question, say for whom you are developing your system, who is your end user, because the different end users have different requirements. Obviously, if you are protecting a military base in one requirement, if you provide protecting the musical festival in the summer, it's another requirement and if you protecting your personnel yacht in the Caribbean or somewhere it's another requirement. So we came to the problem. It's actually, it's not that important to design the drone and its counter UAV system, but it's important to design the Counter UAV system, specific Counter UAV system, for specific user. And as a result, we talked to a few partners in Europe and we've been successful in obtaining a project and the R&D grant from the European Union. And the project is called the DroneWISE. And the aim of the grant is actually to engage with the end users, with the law enforcement agencies. In some cases, advise them what to do, in some cases to learn from them what they want, so the system could meet their requirements and to put together some sort of a plan and the product which can help them deal with the counter UAV systems more efficiently. And it says here that the aim of this DroneWISE is to significantly improve the security of public spaces by enhancing cooperation and coordination between the first responder agencies. And the objectives of this project are listed here. And it's quite a few of these objectives. And we started with the analysis of the end user requirements. As I said, there are different end users and all of them they have different requirements. So no point to develop one system to meet all these requirements, instead, in some cases, a simple gyroscope system from DJI will be sufficient. But in many cases, it's not. And you need to have a special custom-made system. What we also know is that the technology never stops, and the bad guys are usually the first one to employ the new technology against you. So we are always catching up with them. So we are conducting the continuous analysis, all the new technologies which are coming up to the market, and we are actually implementing them in our systems as well. And very often in this attacks, it's not one agency that will be acting, but maybe multiple. So there is also the issue of the coordination between the different agencies. And again, we are providing some recommendations how this could be done in the most efficient way, assuming that the agencies already have some sort of system in place. So the counter UAV system should be integrated into existing solutions, rather than the opposite, rather than the existing system should be adapted to the new counter UAV. What we also did, we actually looked to all the terrorist cases what have been done with drone help, and we have a huge library of these cases. And finally, one of our outcomes, what we did, was develop the counter UAV training program. And this training program is again, is customized, and it's for the different end users, we provide a different level of training. The training is quite comprehensive. It includes the technical part of the training, describing the drones and the counter UAV technologies, the different sensors, advantages and disadvantages for each of the sensors. But the significant part of the training is dedicated to regulations. Simple questions, like in many countries, the jamming is not legal, even police cannot use the jamming. So what do they do with the drone flying into towards them and their critical infrastructure, and so on. There is also new regulations that coming up slowly, so we are helping the law enforcement agency to understand this new regulations, and to modify their procedures accordingly. And the output of our project, which will be in a few months, will be a training program. It will be a handbook for the law enforcement agencies describing what are all the tools and what to do and how to manage these tools. We also work with quite a few law enforcement agencies to develop the coordination strategy. And we are also putting the trainers through trainers' program, because we cannot go anywhere in the world and start training. So we are providing this training for trainers where people who attend our training program, they will be doing consecutive trainings to their colleagues. And we are developing and it will be live soon, a counter UAV online training portal where more or less everywhere they can go and look through the slides, look through their training and pass maybe even some mock tests and a mock exam to get a better understanding to all the issues related to this. So you mentioned this book. But Arctech has also asked us to promote the book. So I use this chance to do a little bit of promotion. So this is our book it was published a few months ago. And we really enjoy doing it. And we like doing it. So hopefully you will like it. Not at least as much as we but hopefully you will like it. And that completes my presentation. And thank you very much. We'll be happy to take questions.
