The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2016This year a UK Home Office backed coalition of regional Police Authorities will embark on a project to extend their national surveillance network by deploying unmanned airborne surveillance drones across the country. It’s planned that in the build up to 2012 the drones will be used to foil potential terrorist attacks, detect illegal immigration planning to cross the channel (by flying over France?), monitor anti-social behaviour and public order situations (demonstrations) and of course to gather intelligence on subversive activities. The introduction of these drones represents a significant expansion of the surveillance state, planned and delivered by un-democratic consortium of police authorities and loosely regulated by vague and rarely tested laws. With this expansion of the surveillance state should come an equal counter-response probing the legal and practical boundaries of surveillance: What methods can be used to disrupt or destroy drone technology?

The drones come in a number of flavours; the ‘military derived’ Afghanistan tested fixed wing  HERTI drone from BAE Systems, the much smaller and less serious looking rotor driven Hicam Microdrone and the rumoured Lindstrand Technologies GA22 airship unmanned inflatable drone. ar drone parrot moteur bloquéthe drones are usually equipped with remote cameras but have already been tested to carry loudspeakers, LRAD audio technology and weaponry such as Tasers and Flash-ball guns (as demonstrated by Tecknisolar Seni in France).ar drone motor kaputt The first of the drones to be tested this year (in Liverpool – a strange choice considering the local’s aversion to aerial surveillance) is the ‘Hicam Microdrone MD4-1000‘ essentially an expensive (£30,000) rotor powered radio controlled helicopter equipped with night vision surveillance cameras and loudspeakers. parrot ar drone xataka

The microdrone can take video images from a 500m distance and can track and follow human movement using movement capture technology. ar drone 2 zasiegThe drone is small; black ops 2 dragonfire drone controlsless than 1m diameter and 2lbs in weight, they can fly along a pre-programmed GPS route or be controlled ‘live’ by an individual (mobile) police controller viewing the camera’s output through head mounted lcd goggles.ar drone power edition fnac The ‘insurgents’ in Iraq and Afghanistan have had some success in shooting down large fast flying US military drones – similar to the BAU Herti –  using small arms fire; AK47s etc (currently unavailable at Maplins), so the slower moving Microdrones should be easy prey to automatic weapons fire – the obvious problem is that such weapons are illegal (in the UK) and not exactly subtle when used in a ‘public order’ environment.

For taking out Microdrones a (slightly) more legal option might be a paint ball gun which fires large calibre low velocity paint capsules that will blind as well as damage the target. Paint ball guns have the advantage of being legal and commonly available but again, probably not the best choice for riots and demonstrations. For these occasions, the simple hand held catapult firing a range of improvised ammunition should do the job though surreptitiously hitting a moving 1m sized target at a range of, say, 100 metres may require a little target practise…and may take a few shots as the drone can still fly with only two of its four rotors functioning. Jamming the control and navigation signals should be an effective way of disabling the drones – jammers work within a fixed range radius rather than having to be targeted and have the added benefit of being non-destructive – allowing the capture and re-use of the confused drone… The Microdrone uses the same radio control method as model RC aircraft to direct it’s flighpath.

The exact frequency used by the police probably falls within the UK frequency regulations for RC aircraft otherwise RC frequencies can easily be scanned and jammed using RF jammers for selected frequencies or more crudely saturate the whole spectrum. Build your own RF Jammer: “If you want to saturate the bandwidth, you use an analog device with simple FM modulation. Eight 2.4Ghz wireless video transmitters of sufficient power would do it.” The Hicam Microdrones navigate using standard GPS, which is particularly sensitive to jamming. There are a number of portable GPS jammers on the market or for a few quid you can build your own… US authorities were alarmed when they discovered that the Taliban have been using Russian authored Sky Grabber software to intercept drone video signals: “SkyGrabber is a hobby for person who accepting free to air satellite data by digital satellite TV tuner card  from satellite provider. SkyGrabber is for fun.” An important aspect of intercepting drone signals will be to use the footage against the police or is support of legal defence.

A standard domestic microwave could be focussed using a parabolic dish to direct the beam on a single source capable of destroying and disrupting circuity in cameras and motors. Downside is, mistakes could be dangerous or fatal… Equip a common-or-garden toy RC helicopter with an attachable line that locks to a target drone. Once attached, pull the police drone down by hand… ‘Idrone’  a French UAV http://www.idrone.fr/ Wired magazine review of UAVsLakeside Labs is a cluster for science and innovation in the area of information and communication technology, focusing on self-organizing networked systems. It offers space for creative ideas in an international environment that promotes scientific excellence and mutual appreciation. About 60 people from various disciplines are funded by Lakeside Labs. The cluster is lead and managed by the nonprofit company Lakeside Labs GmbH. Research activities are performed at the University of Klagenfurt and Lakeside Labs GmbH, partly in cooperation with academic and industrial partners.

Our lab has a fleet of heterogeneous drones with various capabilities. They are equipped with visual and thermographic cameras. In order to perform surveillance or monitoring tasks, we developed several centralized route planning algorithms. We are also working on the sensing aspect of drones. We try to achieve better positioning accuracy and thus better navigation of the drones. It can be achieved by using multiple sensors that are placed on board of a drone. Currently we focus on information fusion from the following sensors: the inertial measurement unit (IMU), GPS, and visual camera. We also investigate different network aspects and we are also exploring the network establishment, where all the nodes can communicate with each other. Our flying robots lab is equipped with fleet of small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles: We investigate the coordination of heterogeneous multi-robot systems for autonomous exploration of unknown indoor environments. All robots are equipped with laser range scanners or Microsoft Kinect for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).

The goal of this work is to have a multi-robot system autonomously explore an indoor environment with self-organizing organization. We use the following robots: The test and measurement laboratory of Lakeside Labs GmbH at the Lakeside Science & Technology Park in Klagenfurt is open for different measurement and testing services available. This laboratory enables, for example, encoding, decoding and analyzing of GSM and UMTS signals. Simulations of various digital circuits can be generated in various test scenarios. The laboratory is equipped with these devices: The smart microgrid lab provides the tools for hands-on experience and research on smart microgrids. The laboratory is a smart microgrid on its own containing a renewable energy source, energy storage, and several reference loads. Energy is provided by a photovoltaic system at the rooftop. A data acquisition system provides data about the output power of the photovoltaic system in real time. The lab’s battery system is capable of storing up to 10 kWh of electrical energy.

The lab can operate in grid mode or island mode, thus simulate a typical smart home as well as a fully autonomous system. Research experiments in the lab include smart metering, self-organizing smart appliances supporting demand response and load scheduling approaches. In the “Programmable Radio Lab” we implement and evaluate new protocols for (wireless) communications. For this we have several programmable radio platforms among which is the so called WARP-platform (see http://warp.rice.edu/ for further information). The implementation of this platform is fully customizable such that new protocol ideas can be implemented and tested in real-world environments. Measurement results are used to gain new insights to improve the performance of protocols. The lab consists of 100 low power wireless modules called Zolertia (Z1). Z1 follows the legacy design of Telosb nodes, equipped with a packet based, 2.4 GHz, low power CC2420 radio chip and a 16-bit ucontroller of TI MSP430 series.