Team Dedrone took the top prize at US Special Operation Command’s (USSOCOM) ThunderDrone ‘Game of Drones’ outdoor demonstration at Nellis Air Force Base on 18-20 June, highlighting the increasing capacity of industry to meet the counter-drone demands of allied special operations forces.
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Hosted by the United States Air Force (USAF) AFWERX and USSOCOM's SOFWERX, industry and airspace security leader Dedrone, as part of a combined team of Echodyne Corporation, Squarehead Technologies and Battelle, won first place at the 'Game of Drones' outdoor demonstration at Nellis AFB in Nevada.
ThunderDrone is a USSOCOM and SOFWERX initiative dedicated to drone prototyping, which focuses on exploring drone technologies through idea formation, testing and demonstrating efforts that are being conducted collaboratively with the US Department of Defense's Strategic Capabilities Office, highlighting the capability of the industry to rapidly prototype and deploy counter-unmanned aerial drone technology in response to operational requirements.
Team Dedrone successfully demonstrated the capabilities of a layered detection, tracking, classification and mitigation solution to defend protected airspace against aerial drone threats. The competition saw 93 counter-drone technology companies form teams and were narrowed down through a series of three rapid protoyping events.
The Dedrone platform provided a fully automatic counter-drone solution, designed to detect, classify and mitigate drone-based threats. Dedrone's software, DroneTracker, gathered intelligence from Dedrone's RF sensors, Echodyne's MESA radar and Squarehead's Discovair acoustic sensor.
"Dedrone's open platform and architecture allows customers to combine the best in drone detection and mitigation technology, such as with RF sensors from Dedrone, radar from Echodyne, acoustic sensors from Squarehead, and jammers from Battelle. This multi-layered sensor platform ensures that all organisations, including those under USSOCOM, are provided complete airspace security that is safe from all drone threats," said Joerg Lamprecht, CEO and co-founder of Dedrone.
As part of their mission, SOFWERX leads collaboration between special operations warfighters and select contributors from industry and academia on technology and innovation efforts to bring drones, tactical swarms and their associated data science applications to the special operations community.
More information on the ThunderDrone competition can be found here.