Autonomous counter-drone: is reinforcement learning the solution ?

Abstract

Unmanned aircraft are becoming available to most purchasers due to their decreasing costs and increasing functionalities. While this fact opens the opportunity to new business and services, it also represents a potential threat to the manned aviation, to the protection of sensitive areas and to the National defense. Counter-drone systems are a set of sensors and actuators, that supported by software, are able to detect and neutralize a unmanned aircraft flying in a forbidden area. Being managed by unaware recreational pilot or by a malicious one makes no difference when the result can be as catastrophic as a commercial aircraft accident. Rapidly any reader will remember the unfortunate events that in the winter of 2018-19 caused major economical lost to two London airports. Since then many airports have been installing detection systems to be able to take the good and safe decisions on future alarms. Still, the actuator systems of the counter-drone solutions are not well resolved. In this keynote we will present a counter-drone solution based in a unmanned autonomous aircraft. This is a unmanned aircraft, known as interceptor drone, self-learning to neutralize a flying threat in an area that needs to be protected.