Radio Frequency Counter UAS System

Roadmap Creators:

• Sam Youngdale
• Chris Emerson
• Jumpei Sakamoto

Time Stamp: 10 October 2024

Radio Frequency Counter UAS System

Roadmap Overview

Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) are technologies developed to detect, track, and neutralize unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in situations where they pose security threats. With the proliferation of drones around the world, C-UAS is essential to the future airspace security landscape. C-UAS are modular and interoperable with numerous platforms. Demonstrated technologies include radar, electro-optical/infrared, acoustic, and radio frequency sensors for drone detection, as well as communication signals jamming, cyber takeover, and directed energy applications (laser and electromagnetic) for drone mitigation. Due to the variety of C-UAS configurations, our roadmap focuses on radar detection and radio frequency (RF) jamming.

https://www.caci.com/cuas

DSM Allocation

The above 2RFC tree shows the relationship between some systems related to the Counter UAS system that uses radio frequency as for detection and defeat. This tree says that the Counter UAS system consists of the detection system (3RFD), defeat system (3RFJ), classification & tracking system (3CTS), and command and control system (3CCS). In addition, these subsystems require several components such as an RF antenna (4RFA), RF jammer (4RFJ), a processor for classification and tracking (4CTP), command center (4CMC), and so on. As this DSM shows, The DSM indicates that each component is coupled to function as an RF counter UAS system.

Roadmap Model using OPM

Figures of Merit (FOM)

The table above summarizes a number of different Figures of Merit (FOM) for the C-UAS System. The complete system that detects and defeats will have similar FOMs on either side of the chain, and we've selected to focus on Detect as the key FOM. Detect ranges are one of the more widely publicly available data metrics for such systems. However, each entity may not utilize the same metrics for comparison. This study makes the assumption that detection range metrics from different suppliers are one-to-one.

Charting a range of C-UAS RF Systems from worldwide suppliers shows an increasing detection range versus time with a wide data spread.

Technical Model

FOM Sensitivity

The FOM of the counter UAS system is shown above. Among them, we formulate the detection range and probability of detect and evaluate their sensitivity.

Detection Range

Here, GTx, PTx, and f are values determined by the UAS to be detected, but considering that the system's performance varies depending on the detection target, we will check the impact of these values.​

When the partial derivatives of each variable are calculated, the partial derivatives for all variables except f are low values. Therefore, the influence of these variables on the detection distance, which is an important index in evaluating the performance of the system, is easy to interpret.