Graduate students work on U.S. Secret Service drone detection project

The world is changing as you know, with technology, we always have to be ahead of adversaries. So one of the problems that we brought as the Secret Service to Virginia Tech was counter drone technology.  The Secret Service wanted a group of individuals, such as students, to come up with creative ideas and look into new ways to detect drone signatures. So we used a MEM microphone array with 16 microphones on it to both find a direction of arrival and quantify a drone signature as a go or no go if it's present or not. After audio was received, we trained a model so it can learn and decide if it's a drone sound or not. The Basler ace camera we'll also mount that on a gimbal, and that will be programmed in such a way that it would automatically turn, and we can just track it as it moves across the sky.  And each of these nodes is equipped with a GPS and magnetometer, basically a fancy compass. So we know where the nodes are and what direction they're facing. And when we have two or more nodes all detecting a drone at the same time, I'm able to use that information to triangulate where the drone is. It's really fun to work on a project that people care about. Each of us in the group came from very different backgrounds, technically speaking, as well as experience, and we were able to lean on all those different technical specialties to work on different parts of the project to make everything work together more efficiently. Solution wasn't defined like we have to come up with a solution. And that was really interesting.  We created our own system. We didn't just copy something or did something that was already done. Everyone is actually excited to come in every day and work on the projects and stay after. But it's like we all do it because we actually are having a really good time with the project, and we all kind of enjoy figuring out solutions for the problem. It's very impressive how far they've come and the end product has been phenomenal. It was a passion that was great, and they were very excited to see their program come to life, and to see the results of their hard work was amazing.