University leads major multi-institution effort to rethink how to protect against drone threats

A single weaponized drone can drop a grenade, crash into a target, or fire a makeshift missile. A swarm can do all that at once and overwhelm defenses built for one threat at a time.

Is there a way to defend against such small, versatile, and lethal objects?

You might imagine futuristic lasers or electronic jammers knocking small aircraft out of the sky. But Eric Jacques, the Thomas M. Murray Family Junior Faculty Fellow and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, is leading a new research effort that will design ways to protect people and infrastructure on the ground without relying on costly and dangerous active electronic countermeasures.

A cross-disciplinary defense effort

In a high-impact, cross-disciplinary partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jacques is working alongside Craig Woolsey, professor of aerospace and ocean engineering; Aaron Brantly, associate professor and director of the Tech for Humanity Lab in the School of Public and International Affairs; Ioannis Koutromanos, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering; as well as partners at the University of Arkansas and the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center to create passive protection strategies and decision-making tools that can shield soldiers, critical infrastructure, and civilians from the growing threat of weaponized drones.

“Unmanned aircraft system capabilities are quickly evolving, requiring innovative solutions, such as those resulting from this collaboration, to be rapidly developed to reduce risks and secure our nation,” said Bowen Woodson, research structural engineer in the Geotechnical and Structural Laboratory at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center.

Why drone defense matters now

The urgency is clear. Around the world, unmanned aerial vehicles are increasingly being adapted for military use because they are inexpensive and widely available. But beyond the battlefield, they also pose risks to infrastructure and public spaces — and have the frightening potential for use in homeland terrorist attacks.

“Active countermeasures like jamming or shooting down drones aren’t always the best solution,” Jacques said. “They can be costly, carry a real risk of collateral damage, are restricted or illegal in many jurisdictions, and sometimes they simply don’t work or can be overwhelmed. Our focus is on shaping the airspace around the structure and hardening its vulnerable points so that even if a drone slips through, damage is limited and lives are protected.”

The multidisciplinary research team aims to develop an integrated, layered defense, combining three complementary approaches to protect people and infrastructure from unmanned aerial vehicle threats:

• Digital decision-making tools that help commanders and planners quickly choose the right combination of passive drone protective measures for any situation
• Structural hardening and blast mitigation techniques that reinforce vulnerable parts of buildings, utilities, and battlefield positions against drone-delivered explosives
• Designing the space around buildings to disrupt drone access — slowing, channeling, and destabilizing unmanned aircraft systems before they can reach vulnerable façades and soft targets.

Actionable solutions for drone defense

Jacques will use the Virginia Tech Shock Tube Research Laboratory to test how windows respond to small, near-contact explosions, mimicking the kind of blasts that could come from weaponized drones. The team will examine different materials, layering techniques, and designs to find the most cost-effective ways to reduce damage and keep people safe. 

Woolsey will study how obstacles such as trees, overhangs, nets, and other environmental features can interfere with both human-piloted and autonomous drones. Using live flight tests at the Virginia Tech Drone Park and computer simulations, the research team will measure how these barriers affect navigation accuracy and targeting, revealing ways that landscaping and architectural features can slow or misdirect a drone.

“A key challenge in protecting civil infrastructure from weaponized drones is that there is just so much civil infrastructure to protect and there are so many different kinds of infrastructure,” said Woolsey. “Protecting these facilities from flying threats in a way that’s cost-scalable is daunting. By studying how different changes to a facility can affect the performance of a hostile drone, we can learn how to get the greatest protection from limited resources.”

Koutromanos will develop computational tools to model how blasts interact with structures, critical for designing drone-specific protections.

Brantley will use war gaming to test plausible scenarios and evaluate how passive protection measures perform.

At the University of Arkansas, Heather Nachtmann, professor of industrial engineering, alongside colleagues Kelly Sullivan and Rich Ham, will develop tools to help stakeholders optimize the allocation of limited counter-unmanned aerial vehicle resources by integrating risk-based vulnerability assessments, system-interdependence modeling, and operational data into a tractable optimization framework.

“Resilience can be thought of as the ability of a system to maintain appropriate levels of performance when faced with unplanned events,” Nachtmann said. “By taking a systems-thinking approach to enhance stakeholder preparedness, the framework will secure critical facilities and infrastructure and protect U.S. lives against unmanned aerial vehicle attacks.”

After convening government and industry experts, the team will translate stakeholder input into tailored solutions for the highest-priority drone threats. The results will be published as a practical decision guide that ranks protection options and resource allocations for vulnerable facilities, validated through case studies and prototype demonstrations for both civilian and military users.

Local impact

While the research has global implications, the importance to Virginia is hard to miss.

With a concentration of military installations, critical infrastructure, and major public events, Virginia faces many of the same vulnerabilities that the Army is working to solve. This research aims to ensure that civilians and communities, as well as soldiers, can benefit from advances in drone defense.

Looking ahead

Drones are quickly becoming a helpful part of everyday life, used in agriculture, disaster response, commerce, and more. The challenge for the future will be balancing those benefits with the risks, using passive protections and smart planning to reduce vulnerabilities while allowing innovation to continue.

For Jacques, the mission is clear: “Ultimately, we aim to protect people and the places they depend on. High-tech tools help, but the last line of defense will always be sound structural engineering — quiet, passive construction measures that attract little attention and work when it matters most.”