NOTCH INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF183-005

Description

Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (sUAVs) can be easily modified (with chemical/biological agents, explosives and weapons) to attack defense related and commercial targets. One method to counter enemy UAVs (C-sUAVs) involves RF jamming their communication and/or GPS receivers. Phased array jammers that can detect, track and jam such enemy drones are often expensive. Handheld jammers that require a human operator to detect and point the jammer in the correct direction can have unreliable and inconsistent results. Jammers that use omnidirectional antennas simply jam in all directions, but this also ends up jamming friendly communication systems. Notch Inc. is developing a metamaterial retrofit solution than converts simple omnidirectional antennas into smart beamforming antennas that behave like phased arrays. This would be useful for detecting, tracking and disabling aggressor drones. In addition, the RF energy can be also steered away from friendly communication systems that would have otherwise gotten jammed. The retrofit can be inexpensively manufactured and uses COTS parts. In addition, the metamaterial retrofit can be controlled in software to upgrade its direction finding and disabling algorithms.