The world of aviation is changing, and fast. Our skies are no longer the domain of just jet airliners and scheduled flights. UAVs – Unmanned Air Vehicles, or ‘drones’ – herald a new age, and enable all manner of services, from aerial photography to package delivery, and even ‘sky taxis’.
The inevitable surge in UAV use means an increasingly crowded and complex lower airspace – one that traditional air traffic management approaches aren’t equipped to handle. Standard air traffic control radar is designed to see passenger aircraft against a background of clear sky, at much higher altitudes than UAVs operate. What’s more, UAVs are around 1,000 times smaller, and there will be far more of them.
Specifically for this kind of detection and recognition challenge, Thales-owned Aveillant has developed Holographic Radar – a revolutionary technology capable of providing a comprehensive, fully digital 3D picture of the sky.
Rather than scanning a radar beam across an area, Holographic Radar employs a ‘staring array’ to look everywhere, all of the time. This allows tracking of multiple small targets simultaneously, over a very large area of airspace.
The immediate demand for this capability is to protect airports from ‘rogue’ drones. Holographic Radar is currently employed at several international airports around the world, preventing a recurrence of the deliberate disruption caused by drones at Gatwick and Heathrow airports in 2019.
In the future, however, Holographic Radar will be integral to the surveillance infrastructure that upholds safe operation of UAVs in lower airspace. Aveillant radars are already a key part of the National Beyond Visual Line of Sight Experimental Corridor (NBEC), a safe, segregated airspace initiative for testing drone infrastructure and testing activity for airspace structures and unmanned traffic management (UTM) concepts.
Aveillant has two radars at Cranfield as part of this initiative: the dedicated drone detection radar Gamekeeper, and the long-range experimental prototype radar Quadrant.
Both are based on the same Holographic Radar technology, and bring a unique digital surveillance capability to NBEC. A feature of Holographic Radar that sets it apart from conventional approaches is its ability to produce a very high definition target signature, to which machine learning algorithms can be applied to produce a target classification. This is vital for drone detection systems, as when a radar is sensitive enough to see small drones, it will also pick up many other objects – ranging from birds to treetops swaying in the wind. It’s vital that any low-airspace radar can distinguish such objects from drones, so it can avoid overloading the operator. Combining the ‘staring array’ holographic approach with powerful machine learning algorithms creates a truly unique capability.
Holographic Radar will be integral to the surveillance infrastructure upholding safe operation of UAVs in lower airspace.
Dominic Walker, Chief Executive Officer, Aveillant
Almost through necessity, drones in the skies above our towns and cities will become commonplace, and most people won’t even consider the hugely complex surveillance infrastructure that will make it possible. But that’s precisely what Thales and Aveillant are developing at Cranfield’s NBEC facility, with Holographic Radar.