Monica Jackson
Four companies have booked winning berths in a three-day prototyping competition held in June that sought technologies that could thwart enemy unmanned aerial systems, the National Defense Magazine reported.
The U.S. Special Operations Command organized the event called Game of Drones, which is the third and final installment of the ThunderDrone competition.
The winning counter-UAS prototype was integrated with Dedrone’s DroneTracker intelligence data gathering platform, Echodyne Corp.’s Multi-Role Electronically Scanned Array radar, Squarehead Technologies’ Discovair acoustic sensor and Battelle’s DroneDefender defense system.
The four companies partnered in the first round of the ThunderDrone event and finalized their joint work before the second round in April.
ThunderDrone is part of an effort to keep pace with adversaries such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which has been developing and leveraging advanced autonomous drones for warfighting.
About 30 out of 100 companies participated in the Game of Drones event held at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
