Overview
- Air University students advanced low-cost counter‑drone prototypes from lab demos toward flight testing, aiming to validate performance outside controlled settings.
- The teams designed a distributed mesh that links commercial sensors and processes data on site, which lowers cost, eases scaling, and keeps detection working if networks drop.
- A student group produced a working software demo in under 24 hours that distinguished multiple classes of small drones, then expanded into hardware builds using AI tools.
- The effort baked in legal safeguards for U.S. skies, with students checking national airspace rules and privacy protections to keep human decision-making accountable.
- Operators, program offices, universities, and industry helped scope the problem, highlighting high costs, poor interoperability, and missing shared data that Alpha Blue now flags for department-wide fixes rather than replacing formal programs.