How drone detection is taking off

Whilst the first drone took to the skies way back in the early 1900s, many of us are still eagerly anticipating a time where drones have an everyday role in the lives of both businesses and consumers. But we may be closer than we think. Today, there are more than 60,000 licensed drone operators registered in the UK, and that number is only set to grow.   

The drone industry holds a whole host of potential for people and businesses alike – not just for retail deliveries but also for their ability to aid search and rescue missions, transport bloods and medicines and even support with emergency policing.   

But before this can all become an everyday reality, a whole new set of considerations needs to come into play. Technology options to create awareness of drones in the sky are increasing, and there is little doubt that over the next couple years we will see more identity and conspicuity approaches entering the market. There is however still a question mark, will all drone users be visible? What can the role of Drone Detection have within this? 

Initially Drone Detection (also known as Counter Drone and C-UAS) was considered a way of defending against the rogue use of drones only, but now we are seeing more and more evidence as to how this technology can have multiple roles to support the security of our skies and a role in unlocking them. Sometimes even for the same organisation. Just as increased vehicles on the road or planes in the sky need extra infrastructure to run securely, drones need their own kind. And it’s even more critical at a time when the industry is growing so fast.  

We look at this through 3 lenses: 

1. Purest Drone Security – How can Drone Detection/CUAS help your risk mitigation, whether that be an airport, a stadium, a prison or even companies who need to take their latest greatest product outside to test and need to know if there’s a camera in the sky. 
2. we’ve all seen examples of where a drone has caused disruption, whether that be the well-known airport examples, recently in premier league games, or even how the conjecture of a drone sighting has brought chaos. The risk of these moments increases as the volumes in our skies grows. Mistakes, or purposeful acts will of course happen. How do we prove these breaches of security even occurred? Subsequent investigations are expensive and timely and often yield little results. 
3. Pop up Situational Awareness – How can light touch drone detection create situational awareness to support a drone operator’s safety case? Are you a drone operator who needs to provide an extra level of risk mitigation? Maybe you’re performing an emergency search and rescue mission or creating a display for an event. 
4. Larger scale situational awareness – How can drone detection on fixed infrastructure support the Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) corridors? Hello Project Skyway  

So, what’s the solution? Put simply, BT Group utilise the latest detection technologies to paint a real time picture of the drones around us. We increase situational awareness with cutting-edge software and AI that fuses data inputs together into easy-to-understand outputs, making the solution extremely flexible and easy to implement across multiple use cases. We’ve seen significant advances in this technology over recent years, particularly in becoming more affordable for everyone.  

Our partnership with DroneShield continues to develop, enabling us to launch a diverse portfolio of drone detection products available today. Our drone detection devices can be body-worn, vehicle mounted or even deployed across a fixed site. This is further backed by a market leading Command and Control platform that can monitor your premises and alert users of any incursions, all remote and fully autonomous. Our fully integrated system provides situational awareness of drones in the skies and above, all in real-time.   

The drone age has officially arrived – and it’s time that businesses start thinking about how they can use drone detection solutions to give them the level of situational awareness needed to help them truly thrive.   

At BT Group we’re here to help you navigate the drone solutions your business needs, get in touch to find out how we can help at drone.solutions@bt.com or drop me a message.