• Rapid advances have turned drones into aerial spies and flying bombs.
• They pose increasing risks to governments, companies, and public utilities.
• Defense companies like MARSS and Dedrone sell systems designed to defeat drones.

Attack drones are evolving so rapidly in the cauldrons of combat in the Middle East and Ukraine that militaries and even law enforcement agencies see a pressing need for defenses.

Companies are rushing to meet these needs even as unmanned aerial vehicles continue to change rapidly to exploit vulnerabilities.

"That's essentially been what we've been trying to do over the last decade — play catch up — and the UAV threats have always been able to stay one step ahead of the counter-[unmanned aerial systems] systems as we're developing them," said Jamey D. Jacob, a mechanical engineer who is director of Oklahoma State University's Unmanned Systems Research Institute.

This demand for defenses is a booming area where start-ups and newer companies compete with the largest defense contractors to build the sensors and weapons to defeat drones and the AI-assisted networks that integrate them into a clear picture for a human operator.

The typical ways to counter drones can be broken into four steps: detect, track, identify, and mitigate threats. Sensors like radars and cameras are essential to the first three tasks. The final step to stop the threat can be accomplished via frequency jamming and electronic warfare (soft-kill) or by physically damaging it (hard-kill).

One company specializing in creating the battlefield awareness systems to spot and defeat drones is MARSS, a global defense technology company.

MARSS' technology is designed to detect, analyze, and annotate the heaps of data collected by its integrated systems and present it in a way "that the drone operator could understand it extremely easily," said Josh Harman, Vice President of Business Development at MARSS Group.

"What was happening when the drone threat started to continually evolve and get more complicated, you had to turn drone sensor solutions into a layered defense solution," he added.

The defense tech company focuses on developing counter-drone platforms that detect threats for civilian, government, and military clientele.

Earlier this year, MARSS showcased its AI-driven NiDAR counter-drone system at the Red Sands military drills in Saudi Arabia, jointly run by Saudi armed forces and the US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command.

"Over the course of the Red Sands exercise, MARSS demonstrated multi-sensor integration on a single UI that was mature and devastatingly effective against the various air threats — reducing the decision cycle of 'detect to defeat' to a matter of seconds," Harman told UASWeekly at the time.

'Golden age of aviation'

Drone defenses are difficult and iterative simply because they are counters to technology that's leaping ahead.

The flexibility and cost-effectiveness of UAVs has ushered in a "new golden age of aviation where you can come up with really neat ideas that you weren't able to develop a decade ago," said Jacob, the UAV expert at OSU.

"What we see in the drone industry is really flipping this conventional aircraft design cycle on its head, which is really what allows new companies to compete because they could be much more nimble and don't have to have the big development budgets that are necessary for the development of full-scale manned aircraft," Jacob told Business Insider in an interview.

The drone makers and pilots are devising ways to dominate the battlefield while drone defenders try to figure out how to neutralize them in a game of spy-vs-spy that has implications far beyond the battlefield. Drone defenses range from radiofrequency detectors to jammers and guns. MARSS sees an opportunity to network them together into an integrated, operator-controlled network.

"Most companies in the market were building specific sensors, whether it be radars, radio frequency, directed energy, kinetic energy, kinetic guns, missiles, or whatever it may be," said MARSS's Harman. "Essentially, you had a lot of different systems out there working independently, not in sync, and you had a low success rate across not only all the US services but also the international services as well."

Another defense company has developed its drone shields from combat use in Ukraine.

Virginia-based drone company Dedrone by Axon has integrated artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions into its open-architecture counter-drone platforms.

"When you think about our use across the world — both on the public safety side, but especially on the national security side — by virtue of being in situ, not only does our AI-ML machine get smarter every day, but we are also able to benefit and improve our system at that same pace that the drones are evolving in the conflict zones," said Mary-Lou Smulders, CMO and head of government affairs at Dedrone.

Dedrone allows a buyer, such as an airport authority or electrical power plant, to set up a network of sensors and jammers and have AI guide the user to quickly identify and respond to threats it detects.

MARSS also says its counter-drone networks are enhanced by supervised machine learning and AI skillset to alert the user sooner.

"It's a big, big deal when you can extend the range on detection, you give the operator a lot more time to act accordingly and to lower any mistakes," Harman said. "When you can eliminate a large portion of all the false positives, you allow the operators to focus on what they need to focus on."