"These Are the Drones You're Looking For: Improved Design, Detection, Navigation, Cyberdefense"
Some teams at the Stevens Institute of Technology are engaged in the physical and digital defense of drones. The head of the Safe Autonomous Systems (SAS) lab, Jafarnejad Sani, who joined Stevens in 2019, predicts that as drones become an increasingly important part of modern engineering, delivery services, and homeland security, physical and remote cyberattacks against them will become more prevalent. Sani and his team focus on cybersecurity, programming situational intelligence and awareness into networked drone formations and systems. His lab is equipped with an indoor flying range, a Vicon motion-capture camera system, and computation stations for the design, testing, and verification of both aerial and ground robots. Sani and Stevens Ph.D. candidate Mohammad Bahrami recently conducted proxy tests to identify stealthy adversaries for networked Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) using several quadrotors in the SAS lab. Sani received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in April 2022 to advance his work on attack-resistant vision-guided drones in partnership with a team from the University of Nevada, Reno. He explains that they will use control theory and Machine Learning (ML) tools to identify and defend against cyberattacks, with a focus on high-dimensional visual data. They will also develop novel detection, isolation, and recovery algorithms to help UAV fleets defend against and recover from hacks and cyberattacks. This article continues to discuss efforts being made at the Stevens Institute of Technology to improve the cybersecurity of drones.