Drone Swarms & Counter Drone Swarms
Drone swarms, including kamikaze and commercially available small drones, have emerged as a disruptive factor in modern warfare. Recent conflicts (Ukraine, Iran, Israel) demonstrate that swarms create an economic dilemma for traditional air-defence systems, while their speed of innovation, modularity, and commercial availability outpace conventional military development cycles.
Belgian Defence seeks dual-use solutions that enable human-directed autonomy, swarm resilience, and counter-swarm capabilities, to ensure operational effectiveness and strategic sovereignty. This requires bridging research, SMEs, and Defence into a fast, distributed innovation ecosystem capable of delivering mission-speed prototypes.
Illustrative Scenario
A coordinated swarm of FPV drones is deployed against a forward operating base. Traditional defence systems are quickly saturated. Some drones carry explosives, others distract with decoys, while a third wave jams local communications.
Despite these layered attacks, operators must maintain situational awareness, defend critical assets, and ensure continuity of operations. Counter-swarm measures must adapt in real-time: detecting, confusing, neutralising, or even dogfighting drones, while protecting friendly systems.
Exemplar enabling technologies
Belgian Defence encourages innovators to think creatively and combine commercial and defence technologies. Possible directions include (but are not limited to):
– Autonomous drone navigation: indoor/outdoor exploration, GNSS-denied navigation, obstacle avoidance.
– Swarm intelligence & communication: inter-drone NFC, redundant communication stacks, jamming/spoofing resilience.
– Counter-swarm systems: kinetic effectors, directed-energy/HPM testing, drone-dogfighting, human-swarm interface.
– Simulation & training tools: FPV drones integrated into gaming environments, synthetic data generation, digital sandbox for AI training.
– Deployment systems: high-altitude release, multi-domain (air/land/sea) swarms, autonomous manipulators for indoor operations.
Service-specific examples
Army
- Test swarm resilience in urban or forested canyons.
- Develop autonomous ground or indoor drones for reconnaissance and manipulation.
- Integrate drone-borne kinetic or non-kinetic effectors for perimeter defence.
Air Force
- Counter kamikaze drone swarms targeting air bases and radars.
- Develop human-directed autonomous swarms for decoy or denial missions.
- Advance high-altitude deployment and re-entry concepts for drones.
Medical Service
- Ensure continuity of battlefield medical logistics during swarm disruptions.
- Protect medical evacuation drones and delivery systems from hostile swarms.
- Explore dual-use applications of swarm navigation for disaster relief.
Navy
- Detect and neutralize hostile drone swarms launched from small boats or coastal platforms.
- Deploy autonomous drone swarms for maritime surveillance, mine detection, and anti-piracy missions.
- Ensure resilience of naval communication and navigation systems against drone-based jamming or spoofing.
- Explore dual-use applications for search-and-rescue at sea (e.g., autonomous drones coordinating with ships or helicopters).
Possible Topics (non-exhaustive)
- Autonomous indoor drone explorer.
- Autonomous outdoor drone in GNSS-denied environment.
- Experimental HPM test set-up for drone resilience.
- Low-bandwidth inter-drone communication (NFC).
- Human-directed drone targeting & shooting demonstrator.
- FPV drone simulation in a first-person shooter game.
- High-altitude balloon deployment of drones.
- Autonomous indoor manipulator drone (doors, switches, valves).
- Multi-domain FPV drone (air–land-water interface).
- 6-DoF drone navigation and targeting experiments.
