SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: Enforcement of Geofencing Policies for Commercial Unmanned Aircraft Systems

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The adoption of services and applications that rely on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) is expected to continue its acceleration for the foreseeable future. Such services and applications include search and rescue, crop monitoring, real-time traffic monitoring, critical infrastructure inspections, and others. As UAS continue to proliferate, aviation regulatory agencies around the world are facing a challenging dilemma in terms of safely integrating UAS operations into their respective national airspace systems and enforcing their compliance to relevant regulations, including enforcement of no fly-zones. Current UAS lack effective on-board flight restrictions that would prevent them from entering critical airspace, e.g., airport runways and nuclear power plants. Furthermore, it is essential that the safety and privacy of members of the public be safeguarded from accidental and non-accidental UAS incursions. This project aims to address these critical needs by developing offensive and defensive measures for detecting, identifying, and bringing down UAS that violate controlled/restricted airspace in an automated, controlled, and reliable manner.A three phase approach to thwarting a UAS encroaching on restricted airspace will be used: (1) detect the incursion using passive radar that exploits signals of opportunity and radio frequency (RF) communications/emissions from the encroacher itself; (2) deploy one or more defender UAS, capable of learning the motivations and behaviors of the encroacher, to pursue the UAS and gain and maintain proximity to it even should the encroacher take evasive action; and (3) have the defender UAS launch offensive measures that manipulate/compromise the sensor and actuation signals the encroacher relies on to stay airborne.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.