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DARPA has unveiled Dragnet, a counter-UAS concept that would use persistent surveillance by unmanned aircraft to try to find other UAS that pose threats in complicated urban environments. Through a Broad Agency Announcement, DARPA is calling on industry to create a “threat-agnostic non-line-of-sight” surveillance system, which would would eliminate potential advantages that adversarial UAS have when they attempt to use their surroundings as ways to thwart detection.

All potential proposals will have three basic requirements: signal processing algorithms for NLOS detection, tracking, and classification of small UAS; sensor subsystems using low size, weight and power (SWaP) commodity components suitable for mounting on airborne platforms; and a networked multiplatform system for autonomously generating and disseminating a common operational picture (COP) to ground forces in the coverage area. Some components are ready for small UAS today, while others will be available in the future. For the program, designers are expected to improve upon current UAS technology, as opposed to creating their own systems.

"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," DARPA said in the announcement. "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.

An Aerial Dragnet illustration, which can be seen in this post’s main image, shows an ideal proposal for DARPA. The system in the illustration is accompanied with surveillance nodes, and it also comes equipped with the ability to constantly provide an updated COP of the low altitude airspace. The COP will also provide information of UAS in the area, and label them as friends or foes, for accredited users to see.

The program will have three phases, each taking place over the course of 15 months. The initial phase will challenge systems to cover a small area of surveillance, with the second phase tripling the first phase’s original coverage area. The third and final phase will triple the second phase’s coverage area, and will test a system’s ability to track attacks from 20 UAS over the span of 24 hours.

For the systems that are being created, there is a pricing limit, but exceptional systems that achieve the goals of the program will be accepted as well.

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