Dedrone has announced that its team of Echodyne Corporation, Squarehead Technologies and Battelle, won first place at ThunderDrone’s “Game of Drones” outdoor demonstration at Nellis Air Force Base and AFWERX enclave, June 18-20.
Hosted by AFWERX, Team Dedrone bested five other teams in the last of three ThunderDrone rapid prototyping events focusing on countering small, unmanned aerial drones.
Team Dedrone successfully demonstrated the capabilities of a layered detection, tracking, classification and mitigation solution that defends protected airspace against aerial drone threats. Initially, 93 counter-drone technology companies formed teams and were narrowed down through a series of three rapid prototyping events.
The Dedrone platform is a fully automatic counter-drone solution, designed to detect, classify and mitigate drone-based threats. Dedrone’s software, DroneTracker, gathers intelligence from Dedrone’s RF sensors, Echodyne’s MESA™ radar and Squarehead Discovair acoustic sensor. Once DroneTracker makes a positive identification of a drone, Battelle’s non-kinetic defense system, DroneDefender™, is automatically triggered to defeat the drone and eliminate the threat.
The Dedrone platform combines hardware sensors and machine-learning software, providing early warning, classification of and mitigation against all drone threats. Based in San Francisco, Dedrone was founded in 2014.
ThunderDrone is a U.S. Special Operations Command and SOFWERX initiative dedicated to drone prototyping, which focuses on exploring drone technologies through idea formation, testing and demonstrating efforts that are being conducted collaboratively with the Department of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office.
SOFWERX leads collaboration between special operations warfighters and select contributors from industry and academia on technology and innovation efforts to bring drones, tactical swarms and their associated data science applications to the special operations community.
