PRE2018 3 Group4

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1. Root
2. Notes
3. Initial ideas
4. State of the Art
5. Project setup
6. Present situation
7. Solutions

0LAUK0 - 2018/2019 - Q3 - group 4

Group members

Name	Student ID	Major
Jort de Bokx	1050214	Software Science
Sander de Bruin	1006147	Software Science
Stijn Derks	1008002	Software Science
Martin de Quincey	1007047	Software Science and Applied Mathematics
Nick van de Waterlaat	1009357	Software Science

Introduction

The goal of this wiki page is to show a study and analysis of a robotic subject. This research is an assignment of the course Robots Everywhere (0LAUK0). For this project, students work in a group of 5 choosing a subject in the core of robotics to work on, thereby making sure the USE aspects are leading. As is normal in a Wiki, multiple pages will be used rather than considering one extremely long page. Make sure to explore all subpages contained under this page.

Notes

Initial ideas

General problem description

Between 19 and 21 December 2018, hundreds of flights were cancelled at Gatwick Airport, following reports of drone sightings close to the runway. A total of 760 flights were disrupted on the 20th of December due to the drone. Naturally, this angered many people whose flight was delayed. Not only does it anger people, but it is also a financial worry for the airport organization as all of these people with delayed flights have to be compensated. The airport did not have any `good' measures to prevent this issue. Gatwick chief operating officer Chris Woodroofe said: `The police are looking for the operator and that is the way to disable the drone'. Woodroofe further elaborates that the police had not wanted to shoot the devices down because of the risk from stray bullets. This is, of course, not something that is to be repeated as this caused much inconvenience for many travellers. The airport itself only had detection and tracking devices, but no real effective counter mechanisms available. This issue is not limited to the setting of airports, but it can be further extended to any hot spot, such as the centre of cities, special events that involve essential figures, and more. With the ever-increasing possibilities of technology, it should in the future not be unexpected for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to suddenly show up and wreak havoc. This havoc can range from taking pictures of people in public places to spy or stalk them to terrorists that use UAVs to drop bombs in highly populated areas. These occurrences are more likely to appear as the technology we possess increases.

We think that we should not sit idle and passively wait for the worst-case scenarios to occur before starting to think about countermeasures. The recent incident between 19 and 21 December 2018 at Gatwick Airport should already sound an alarm that we should take an active attitude and develop mechanisms that counter UAVs in effective ways. These mechanisms should be able to deal with much more than mere birds and should consider any form of terrorism that can be caused through the airspace.

Objectives

Objectives of the project as a whole include:

• Gaining insight into accidents and incidents involving various forms of drones.
• Identify and specify the currently existing countermeasures and counter mechanisms against drones and UAVs in general.
• Identify and specify the USE stakeholders of the problem space and their interests regarding possible solutions.
• Propose multiple possible solutions to the problem.
• Identify the advantages and the disadvantages centred around user interests for each provided solution.
• Validate and verify that our proposed solutions solve the discussed problems with respect to the USE stakeholders and their interests.

State of the Art

Project setup

General USE aspects

In this section, we consider the users, society, and the enterprise based on the general problem description.

Users

There are multiple stakeholders involved in a solution to the problem introduced in the problem description. By far the largest and most diverse category of stakeholders consists of those parties that are (majorly) disadvantaged by unauthorized or unwanted UAV operations, or malicious events that could follow. We can identify several subcategories of stakeholders whose material possessions or immaterial values are at stake.

The most important users are as follows:

• The Government

As the governing body, a collection of many large instances with national interests, the government of a nation aims to preserve the material and immaterial assets of its citizens. This goal might be obstructed by the unwanted presence of UAVs or events caused by them.

• Non-governmental organizations

Includes companies or other privately owned bodies that want to protect their material assets against damage from UAV incidents, or protect immaterial assets such as privacy or intellectual property that could be violated by unwanted presence of UAVs.

• Civilians or individuals in general

Civilians or individuals in general are also stakeholders in the problem space that we consider. They might have their assets violated in some way by UAVs or UAV related events, such as civilian espionage empowered by UAVs. Since drone flight is growing as a commercial pass-time, more specifically the operation of drones by civilians for fun is becoming more popular, this user group must also be considered as a stakeholder from this perspective.

Society

Society as a whole is affected by the already existing and upcoming dangers of drones. First of all, drones can be a massive hindrance at for example airports (Gatwick airport), football stadiums or other public places. However, apart from simple hindrance, drones can also be extremely dangerous for society, as they can be weaponised and used by terrorists, the military or any other person with bad intentions. Furthermore, more and more people are using drones privately, causing privacy issues for society, as these drones are equipped with a camera most of the times and can easily reach private places. This is why drone interception is so vital to society. If there were to be a tool that could detect, identify and neutralise drones, this could help in a decrease of hostile drones and thereby also decrease the dangers above that drones bring to society.

Enterprise

Enterprise is greatly affected by the illegal use of drones, for example, the airlines at Gatwick lost a lot of revenue due to delayed flights and passenger compensation. The airport itself also suffered from the forced shutdown. Other industries are also threatened by drones, espionage via drones can be done remotely, where attackers may steal a company secrets through aerial photography or by taking pictures through windows. Hence the development of anti-drone will be of enormous benefit to existing enterprises but also spark new business opportunities for security contractors and UAV oriented startups.

Specific problem description

As described in the `Approach' Section, we expected the societal issue of unwanted UAV presence to be divisible into multiple subcategories. Following our initial literature study, we indeed found this to be the case. There are many axes along which the problem space can be divided. For example, we might consider a division based on the nature of the cause of a drone incident, and as such whether it was caused by human failure or technical failure. Another possible distinction can be given based on the specific part of society that is impacted, whether it be the privacy of individuals when a camera-equipped UAV flies over their backyard, or the safety of a group of users when there are UAVs present around an airfield. When we consider the existing legal regulations, another commonly occurring division is that between human-controlled and autonomous UAVs.

This realisation leads us to formulate a more specific problem definition with a smaller scope. In our study, we consider possible deterrents against unwanted UAV presence around airports. This includes studying the current legal regulations considering UAVs, both in general and more explicitly considering airports. The term UAV is also divisible into multiple subcategories, for this study we take all sub-types of UAV into account. These specific sub-types will be further discussed in the following Section.

Specific USE aspects

In this section, we consider the users, society, and enterprise when considering the specific problem description.

Users

Society

Let us take a closer look at how this specific problem description is relevant when we consider society with respect to airports. If a UAVs enter the air space of an airport, aeroplanes are not allowed to land at the airport nor are they allowed to leave the airport. Therefore, airports have placed a ban on the usage of UAVs around the airport in order to make sure that aeroplanes can still land and leave the airport. As one might already know, a tremendous number of people visit airports every day. In 2017, Schiphol airport, located in Amsterdam, already counted 68 515 425 passengers. One can already imagine how enormous the consequences can be if this airport cannot be used for a few days. This means that if a UAVs flies by for whatever reason, a large number of people will not be able to travel. This results not only in many angry travellers but also in airport companies that have to compensate these travellers for the delays introduced by these UAVs.

From a societal perspective, this would mean that all travellers have a risk of their flight being delayed, which is undesirable due to many reasons as elaborated on previously. As of now, we have only considered the situation where a UAV simply flies by but what if this UAV has malicious intentions. For example, what if this UAV has been weaponised and is used by terrorists or a specific individual with malicious intentions and is used to wreak havoc at the airport. Then, these weaponised UAVs could be extremely dangerous as they could result in mass-killings. This would be a colossal disaster, and this should be avoided at all cost. A disaster is not only bound to happen when we consider weaponised UAVs. A disaster could also occur when the systems of the airport do not detect one of these UAVs. This UAV could then end up damaging the aeroplane, which could result in perilous situations. For example, we can expect disastrous situations when a UAV gets stuck in the motor of an aeroplane. All things considered, UAVs cannot only be hazardous to society when operated by malicious attackers, but they can also introduce many annoyances.

Enterprise

When we restrict the USE case analysis to only deterrents against unwanted UAVs or drones around airports, the enterprise aspect of the use analysis becomes more concrete. The main type of enterprise that is under risk is the airport branch. The total revenue of the aviation industry in 2018 alone is a staggering 821 billion USD, so there are huge amounts of money at risk here. The current protocol is to suspend all flights of the airport by 30 minutes, the average lifespan of a drone. This means that, should drones occur often enough, all flights will be suspended for an indefinite amount of time. This will, of course, have huge costs for multiple branches of the aviation industry. The three most notable branches in our opinion are the airports, the airlines and the companies who use aviation to transport goods. For these three enterprise branches, we will analyse the consequences of such an unwanted drone near an airport.

Airports

Airports suffer the largest loss in the case of such a drone in the airspace, which makes sense since it is where the problem is located. The airports suffer huge financial losses mainly through three different ways. First and foremost, no profits can be made when no planes fly. For example, the drone incident at Gatwick Airport caused a loss of over 50 million English Pounds. This was caused by suspending all flights, which were just over 400, over the total duration of 33 hours. The airport suffers a huge blow to their reputation. So the financial hourly losses are huge for airports when flights must be suspended due to drones in the area. Furthermore, should one airport consistently suffer from the presence of unwanted drones, both airlines and travellers might opt to choose a different airport. The other airport might be farther away, but it will be a more reliable airport. This would result in a drop in total passengers at the airport.

Airlines

Airlines such as RyanAir, KLM or EasyJet also suffer huge losses during the event of a drone suspending or cancelling flights. The airlines are the companies actually offering flights to travellers. What also causes more losses for airlines is that they have to compensate the travellers for the delay or cancellation of their flights. By European Law, airlines are required to provide travellers with enough food, drinks, and nightly accommodations for as long as necessary. For a large sudden suspension of flights at one place, which is the case in our problem, this also becomes an enormously difficult task for an airline. If the airline would not act accordingly, the airline could also suffer from a huge reputation loss, resulting in travellers not flying with that airline anymore. Furthermore, the travellers are also eligible for financial compensation by European Law. Airports.

Another aspect of this branch are the employees of the airlines. Apart from the company as a whole, the employees, such as flight attendants and pilots, suffer greatly from such an airline 'shutdown'. This is because of the way that the employees get paid. They do get a baseline salary, but the most salary they receive come from the hours that they are actually in the plane either flying or aiding passengers. If the planes do not fly, they suffer from a huge salary cut, which means that the whole branch of airline employees have financial losses.

Companies who transport goods via aviation

Another enterprise that suffers from delaying and cancelling of flights at an airport are transport companies. In general, these goods are transported with different airplanes than passenger airplanes and also sometimes to different airports. However, these airports can also be subjected to an unwanted drone in the airspace. Again, the protocol is that the airplane will not land and thus will be either delayed or cancelled. This can have dire consequences for such companies.

Present situation

Solutions

In this section, we refer to the solutions, which consider the requirements of the solutions, all possible solutions, and both the advantages and disadvantages of each solution.

Conclusion

Discussion

References