Project-based learning class tackles ‘genuinely needed’ drone defense for U.S. Secret Service

As tires squealed and explosions boomed in the distance, a solitary drone rose above a helipad hidden in the Maryland woods.

A makeshift setup of cameras and microphones aimed in its direction sent information back to a table of laptops, everything running off a single generator, making up a novel system created by a group of Virginia Tech students to rapidly locate and identify potential unmanned aerial threats. 

It’s part of a project-based learning initiative with the United States Secret Service, which the students are demonstrating at the organization’s testing grounds outside of Washington, D.C. As one of five classes working with the Secret Service, this group of five students spent the last academic year developing a combined audio/video detection system and now is working on mitigation efforts for drones in and around the nation’s capital.

The project-based learning program is a fundamental aspect of Virginia Tech’s graduate programs at the Institute for Advanced Computing, offering students the opportunity to tackle real-world problems in an academic setting. Programs based in the new building in Alexandria, just across the river from Washington, D.C., create partnerships like this one that would not be possible without that proximity. Having both the flexibility of the academic environment and a good partner on the outside is crucial.

“They definitely have more time to try different techniques and see if they work, to implement more sensor types,” said Melissa Cameron, assistant collegiate professor at the institute and head of the project-based learning program. “The key to a good partnership is they have to have that willingness to help out the students while also recognizing that the students have other responsibilities.”

This is also a new era for the Secret Service, which launched an Advanced Research Capabilities Division in late 2024, timing that dovetailed into opportunities to work with Virginia Tech.

“We looked at some technologies they were interested in developing with us, and one was drone detection and mitigation,” said Matt Davis, who has served as the point of contact with the Secret Service for all five groups of students. “This is really the first time where we have collaborated on a technology level with a university.”

Defending against drones has taken on new and immediate urgency in recent months in the wake of developments both in the Russia-Ukraine war and the Middle East. Factor in reports of suspected drone activity over a U.S. military base in Alabama and even over Fort McNair in Washington, and it’s no wonder that the Secret Service is intensely interested in what detection and mitigation systems like the ones the students are building might offer.

“We’re not the military,” said Davis. “We have to be very precise when we detect things and mitigate them. We need a controlled methodology, a controlled approach where we have a good detection area and a precise mitigation platform.”

From the students’ perspective, it wasn’t hard to see how urgent the issue was.

“It definitely hit me that this is genuinely needed,” said Ryan Ernest, a graduate student in computer science focused on networking and integration. “In talking with them, I said, ‘This sounds like an incredible project. It also sounds like an impossible project, but I don’t think there’s really anything else that’s as interesting to me.’”

As the project took shape, team members fell naturally into their roles. Computer science student Max Nordberg focused on figuring out the location and size of incoming drones. Karthikeyan Krishnan tackled the visual aspect, integrating data from cameras to calculate distance or size of drone and help tell objects apart.

For Ruth Abate, a computer engineering student who focused on machine learning algorithms for matching audio on the user interface side, the wide open scope was most appealing about the project-based learning portion of the Master of Engineering program.

“It’s really open-ended,” she said. “We can create anything we want.”

That was crucial for Alex North as well, who left his job to come back to school specifically to work on a project like this. With his computer engineering background, he has worked on a lot of the physical hardware of the project as well as the interface with microphone and audio processing, algorithms for noise filtering, and helping to determine what is or isn’t a drone. He was eager to get on this particular project as soon as he found out about it.

“I saw that this project was a good avenue to apply what I’ve already done, along with an exceedingly challenging problem that nobody has really figured out yet,” he said. “It’s what I wanted to do post-graduation, so it was very nice to get a head start on that, experience-wise.”

The setup that the students demonstrated at the Secret Service test range “has been growing legs” within the agency, according to Davis, from its scalability and futureproof design, which doesn’t rely on detecting radio frequencies. And having a partner in Davis who has been willing to not just meet every week with each group, but even travel to Blacksburg on occasion, has been key to the project’s success.

“We’re excited to continue this partnership,” said Davis. “Whether we do drone technology or vehicle cybersecurity, we have access to all the students, and that’s huge for us.”

Learn more about the Master of Engineering graduate programs based in the Washington, D.C. area.