How do you take down a drone? This is the question being asked at DroneClash 2019 next Saturday 16th March.
At this spectacular competition - dubbed by the BBC as “a sort of Robot Wars in 3D” - the latest counter-drone measures will be tested to the limit.DroneClash’s latest videogives some clues as to the range and scale of challenges that await the nine international teams entering DroneClash this coming weekend.
The video depicts a series of increasingly extreme counter-drone measures from net guns to to ball cannons, each struggling to hit the target. Then the camera reveals a new idea: a Tesla Coil. Will the drones fly or fry? With two metre-long sparks and millions of volts, it doesn’t look good for the drones. But it doesn’t stop there! An army of engineers marches on set, representing the drone researchers and First Person View (FPV) pilots who will be battling it out in the DroneClash arena next week.
The spate of drone related incidents in recent months, such as that at Gatwick London Airport, have shown just how disruptive and potentially dangerous drones can be. The need for effective, affordable and scalable counter-drone technology is paramount, which is why the Delft University of Technology is staging DroneClash for the second year in a row. With sponsorship and support from the Dutch Ministry of Defence and the Dutch Police, the event is intended to spark innovations in this important field.
During the course of this spectacular competition, drones will attempt to navigate counter-drone measures like the Tesla Coil in the so-calledHallway of Doom, Death and Destruction,before doing battle with each other. The aim is to take down as many drones as possible, and knock out the rival Queen drone. Teams are competing for a prize pot of €50,000.
Between battles, the audience will be challenged to take down TinyWhoops (small consumer drones) by means of hacking or even by testing out their own counter-drone measures (think: tennis rackets and telescopic wands, rather than fire and fury).
DroneClash also provides a platform for businesses working in the rapidly developing field of counter-drone technology, with the ClashExpo exhibition taking place in parallel.
Posted by microuav on December 13, 2018 at 12:00am
DroneClash 2018 was cool, DroneClash 2019 will be cooler!
Want to win 50.000 euro in prize money? Sign up your team! The DroneClash competition is the next-level FPV competition a 3D robowars. Teams will battle against each other like a real-life video game. Each team is allowed to use as many drones as they like, but they should bring at least one Fighter drone and one Queen drone. The main idea is simple: knock out the rival Queens. How? That’s up to the teams!
DroneClash 2019 will be held on March 16, 2019 at former airbase Valkenburg in Katwijk, the Netherlands Six teams have already signed up for the second edition of the world’s best counter drone competition. Teams who wish to take part in the competition are invited to register before January 16, 2019. www.droneclash.org/teams
The drones soared, most weapons fired, many queens were taken down, and all battles have been fought. DroneClash has happened!
DroneClash is, and always has been, a multi-angle experiment. “I want to get the tinkering back into drones, I want to have fun with drones again, indeed I want to give the counter-drone industry a push with some unexpected views. And maybe I wanted to see if the authorities would allow us to clash drones, all in the name of science of course.” says Kevin van Hecke, co-organizer of DroneClash.
Well, we succeeded in that mission. And then some.
First: a call for new teams! DroneClash 2 is already coming up end of this year! Go here for team and subscription info. Not sure yet why you would want to join? Read below for what happened the first edition.
Battling
For those that aren’t clear on it yet, a quick rundown. Each team starts with at least two drones: a Fighter and a Queen. Each team can have multiple Fighters, as well as additional Queen Defenders. The goal is to have your fighters take down the rival queen. Additional points are awarded by hitting, grounding, or capturing other drones. In between the Fighter arena and the Queen arena lies the Hallway of Doom Death & Destruction, in which we placed counter-drone systems.
The first battle was the Laced Horns versus DeceptiDrones. Gadgets versus skills, flashy colors vs stealth. Countdown… Start! The first battle was away. The fighters from the Laced Horns were fast. Very fast. Without hesitation they left the DeceptiDrone fighters in their own dust and headed to the Hallway. Before anyone realized it, the Laced Horns shot through and arrived in the Queen Arena. They hit the DeceptiDrone queen hard, it did not stand a chance. It was over in less than 30 seconds, with a clear win for the Laced Horns.
This set of events would turn out to be a recurring theme for the Laced Horns. “Skills and speed, just as we thought it would”, an ecstatic Geert Fokkema shouts, team captain of the Laced Horns.
“Actually, no one really knew what to expect. It showed in the first round of battles, gadget-teams that fought against fast or skilled piloted teams were unmatched and sometimes over in mere seconds. We expected the queen take-down to be a very hard task, it wasn’t. We expected that too many drones would fall victim in the Hallway of Doom Death & Destruction, at the hand of the counter-drone measures conspicuously put there. In reality none them were even scratched” says Bart Remes, co-organizer of DroneClash.
Hacking
Food for thought, also for the counter-drone industry. One of the questions we’ve answered many times: what did actually come out of DroneClash in terms of value for the industry? It’s a question also asked by the Ministry of Security and Justice, partner of DroneClash. Well, obviously the drones were all but impervious to our own counter-measures in the Hallway. It turns out that the drones used in DroneClash, some of them not that unrelated to ‘normal’ race-drones, have little to fear from blinding stroboscopes, thick smoke, or even a handheld net-cannon. Too fast, too small, too strong. A lesson in itself.
There were other outcomes too. Most notably, a novel technology was developed by one of our teams FBC2T, the letters being the letters of their first names. This team was another gadget team pur sang, they had developed two huge drones which they packed with everything they could think of. Confetti cannons, flamethrowers, paintball guns, you name it. But actually, their most important weapon was not in the arena, but just besides it. They had employed a hacker, who was able to do a highly intelligent attack on the control signals of the rival drones. In theory, given enough time, the team could overtake controls of any enemy drone. In practice, things were simplified: the plan was to just land them.
Innovation and luck…
“There is theory, there is practice, and there are DroneClash battles”, says Amber Marijs co-organizer of DroneClash. In the chaotic aftermath of the first battle, FBC2T and A3T had to quickly set up their drones for the next battle. FBC2T struggled to get their enormous drones in place, and in the process some of the complex electronics got intertwined with the complex software. It unknowingly changed the ID of their Fighter. It caused them to inadvertently hack their own drone with the new ID. They did however also hack the enemy fighters, for this they gained points. The concept was proven!
FBC2T’s hacking is an amazing feat, more so because this is potentially a legal way to both detect and counter a drone. The team was awarded the Innovation Award by the jury.
In their next battle, against the Laced Horns disaster struck for FBC2T. Although they implemented hacking for all most used protocols, the Laced Horns used another protocol. FBC2T knew that for this battle they would have to change their strategy. The last-minute changes, the time pressure, the little sleep. It caused them to rush things. The countdown started anyway. Start! Laced Horns soared off. FBC2T fired their weapons, but nothing happened. The Laced Horns did not wait around, and quickly finished the job in another spectacular combination of speed, skills, and force. Even against a blue ‘jellyfish’ drone 10 times their size.
Drones will Clash again!
Do you want to have extreme fun with drones? Fit them with all kinds of crazy gadgets, or just make them too fast to see and close to indestructable? For a good cause? We are looking for (international) teams again! Go here for info.
Posted by microuav on December 13, 2017 at 11:37am
Here again an update of DroneClash.
Eight teams signed up at the last moment of the deadline! Exactly what we were aiming at.
The ticket sale (www.droneclash.nl/tickets/) is now officially opened, for 15E you get access to a day long of drones: from DroneClash battles, to a counter-drone and security expo, and even live outside demos.
Paparazzi UAV, the real Open-Source autopilot driven by a community of users without an economically driven goal. Today we are adding an extra autopilot board to there long list of supported autopilots.
The Pixhawk autopilot board will be integrated in our next software release! The video shows the first flight with Paparazzi UAV on a Pixhawk, more videos will follow.
Why choose Paparazzi UAV?
If you are looking for an advanced, modular open-source autopilot which has features others can only dream of, you choose Paparazzi UAV.
You can make the comparison between Windows and Linux. For example APM is the Windows unfriendly plug and pay software, While Paparazzi UAV is the Linux of autopilot systems, where everything you can imagine is possible.
We make it possible for you to choose the best software for your needs, on the hardware platforms that are right for your project.
Wishing you successful flights, The Paparazzi dev team
Recently some of us here at shellntel have been building quadcopters and autonomous vehicles for fun. We are big fans of the Pixhawk flight controller for its awesome autonomous capabilities. We are also big fans of privacy. As much as we like to build and fly these drones, we realize doing so in an irresponsible way can cause concern. We started looking into the various drone communications and discovered a design flaw that allowed us to take control of any drone flying with a specific telemetry protocol.
Telemetry allows the drone to exchange information and commands wirelessly with a ground station. This includes sending/receiving GPS coordinates, waypoints, throttle adjustments, arm and disarm commands, pretty much anything, including a serial shell.
The design flaw is not unique to PixHawk, but rather with the Mavlink protocol. Mavlink is used by many companies including: Parrot AR.Drone (with Flight Recorder), ArduPilot, PX4FMU, pxIMU, SmartAP, MatrixPilot, Armazila 10dM3UOP88, Hexo+, TauLabs and AutoQuad. All of these companies make great products, but if they adopt the Mavlink protocol as is, it may be possible to hijack their drones (and any other drone using Mavlink).
According to its documentation, each Mavlink radio pair is setup with a NetID or channel. This is done to prevent two radio pairs from interfering with each other. By default this value is set to 25, but the user can change this setting. To hijack one of these drones, all you'd need to do is set your transmitter to the same NetID as the target drone.
Looking at the protocol spec, each data packet sent by the radio includes the NetID in its transmission! This means that all we need to do is listen for a single packet within the frequency spectrum, capture it, carve the NetID, and set our radio to use it. This, is surprisingly easy.
Using these radios, we can modify the OSS firmware to simply do this. The following changes were made to radio.c which when compiled is flashed to the transmitter.
Original Code:
// decode the header errcount=golay_decode(6, buf, gout); if (gout[0] !=netid[0] ||gout[1] !=netid[1]) { // its not for our network ID debug("netid %x %x\n", (unsigned)gout[0], (unsigned)gout[1]); gotofailed; }
Modified Code:
// decode the header errcount=golay_decode(6, buf, gout); if (gout[0] !=netid[0] ||gout[1] !=netid[1]) { // its not for our network ID /* Modified by __int128 */ // Set our radio to use the captured packets NetID param_set(PARAM_NETID, gout[0])) // Save the value to flash param_save(); // To read the new value we need to reboot. Rebooting RSTSRC|= (1<<4); /* End of what was added by __int128*/ }
The variable gout[0] is set earlier in the radio.c; which is populated with the NetID of all captured packets. This block of code is only hit when our radio hears a packet from another radio set on a different NetID from ours (which is good because don’t want to reboot each time we hear a new packet). Anyway, that’s it, 3 lines of code is all it takes to hijack any drone using Mavlink. Compile it, flash the radio and you’re good to go. It works surprisingly well and is super quick.
As you know paparazzi is very modular platform. To show the world how modular we are, we work hard on implementing paparazzi into the Parrot Bebop. At the Micro Aerial Vehicle Laboratory MAVLab of Delft University of Technology faculty Aerospace engineering TU Delft we received a pre-production model of the Bebop. We do our best to have paparazzi integrated before the launch of the Bebop. If you want to follow the progress check our youtube channel
after 4 hours after reception of the Bebop
8 hours later after hacking the ESC check-sum First Flight!!!!
The Micro Aerial Vehicle Laboratory (MAVLab) of Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) is proud the present the 2014 International Micro Air Vehicle Conference (IMAV 2014), now offering the possibility of attending the conference by live stream free-of-cost. The live stream will support most platforms showing innovative keynotes of pioneers in the industry as well as the current state-of-the-art presented by many researchers working on MAV's. The schedule is published on the website of the conference.
The conference focuses on research in all areas related to Micro Air Vehicles, with suggested topics including:
- Low-Reynolds and MAV aerodynamics
- Enhanced autonomy and artificial intelligence applied to MAVs
- Sense and Avoid
- MAV swarms, formation flight
- Flapping wings, morphing and bio-inspired MAVs
- Vision-based sensing
- Control theory and state estimation
- Autonomous navigation in GPS-denied environments
- Design methodologies and optimization
- System architecture for MAV operation
- MAV applications and flight testing
Authors may submit two kinds of papers: scientific papers and technical papers (both maximum 8 pages). Scientific papers will be subjected to a single-blind review process of the entire article. All papers will be assigned a DOI and will be available in the TU Delft repository. The authors of the articles nominated for the best paper award will have the opportunity to participate in an expedited review process in the International Journal on Micro Air Vehicles (http://www.multi-science.co.uk/ijmav.htm).
Important dates:
Submission deadline: May 1, 2014
Notification deadline: June 15, 2014
Camera ready submission: June 30, 2014
Competition
=========
The IMAV 2014 will have a single competition, which combines outdoor and indoor elements - and transitions between outdoor and indoor spaces. The competition will simulate a disaster response scenario, in which the teams will have to give an overview of the situation in "Oostdorp", a village constructed by the Ministry of Defense for exercise purposes. The teams have to perform tasks such as indicating which roads are blocked and finding out how many survivors there are inside the houses.
Teams can borrow Parrot AR drones for participating in the competition. The Parrot AR drone is a stable and easily programmable quad rotor equipped with cameras for potential use by computer vision. Since recently, it can be expanded with a GPS and used with the Paparazzi open source autopilot code for autonomous flight outdoors.
Teams can also receive MATLAB licenses and support from MathWorks for the modelling of their MAVs. Notably, a model of the Parrot AR drone is available for the teams.
A selection round is organized for teams that want to join the competition. Teams that want to participate in the competition will have to submit a team video before June 1, 2014.
For the first time in the history of the IMAV events, teams can apply for borrowing an MAV platform for use in the competitions. The IMAV 2011 Summer edition is sponsored by Parrot, the producer of the Parrot AR Drones. Parrot has made it possible for the IMAV organization to lend drones to teams that wish to focus on the artificial intelligence / software part of the competitions.
The procedure for applying for borrowing a Parrot AR Drone:
1. Write a short plan for the competition(s) in which your team wants to participate. Send it to: microuav -at- gmail.com 2. The IMAV 2011 organization evaluates the incoming proposals and notifies the team whether it can borrow a Parrot AR Drone. 3. Register the team and its members for the competition(s) and the conference. 4. After payment of at least two team members, and acceptance of the conditions for borrowing the platform, the Parrot AR Drone will be sent. As a preliminary indication for the conference registration costs, a student pays only 150 Euro for the entire conference / competition, including conference dinner ticket.
Please note that the NUMBER OF DRONES IS LIMITED, and we will assign them on a first-come first-serve basis, if the quality of the proposals is sufficiently high.
