Jammer resistant drone designs spark search for countermeasures
The Russia-Ukraine conflict has driven another stage of evolution for drones and the counter measures to defend against them.
Aurora Flight Sciences announced today the beginning of a collaboration with the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts. The collaboration, under the umbrella of Olin’s Senior Consulting Program for Engineering (SCOPE) program, will bring together a team of senior Olin students with Aurora engineers to solve real-life engineering problems.
The Olin SCOPE team sponsored by Aurora this year will be supporting a research effort in the area of autonomous multi-vehicle cooperative control for unmanned air and sea vehicles conducting littoral operations. Such operations can include missions as varied as mine search, force protection, and search, detection, and identification of threats in riverine, harbor, or coastal environments.
The main objective of this project will be to successfully deploy multi-vehicle coordination algorithms onto teams of actual Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) and Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), using Aurora’s On-board Planning Module (OPM). The OPM is a combined hardware/software element that enables coordination among teams of heterogeneous vehicles. The Olin SCOPE team will be providing a USV of their design to participate in multi-vehicle in-water demonstrations with Aurora’s USV. To this end, the SCOPE team will engineer the integration of the Aurora OPM into their USV system, install the OPM, and conduct end-to-end system testing. In addition, the Olin SCOPE team will research, develop, and integrate a target sensor that can be used by the USV during demonstrations to identify and track test targets.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict has driven another stage of evolution for drones and the counter measures to defend against them.
The new Amorphous software is a universal controller that would allow a single operator to control a swarm of “thousands” of uncrewed systems, from drones to underwater platforms.
India UAV supplier ideaForge has launched the Netra 5 and Switch V2 drones at Aero India 2025, boasting of enhanced endurance, AI-driven autonomy and improved operational capabilities.
The UAV market is experiencing unprecedented growth, with innovations in technology and battlefield applications driving demand across military sectors. From the battlefields of Ukraine to NATO exercises and beyond, drones are transforming how wars are fought and supported.
Launched at AUSA in October, the company’s multi-stream video codec is attempting to bring a new lease of life to drone technology through its AI accelerator.
Quantum-Systems has been upgrading its UAS family, with new versions of the Vector, Reliant and Twister drones set for release throughout 2025.