Airports use AI to detect drones

Airports are turning to artificial intelligence to keep their borders secure from rising drone threats. Aviation officials are concerned about unauthorized drone traffic especially as airlines plan to resume commercial flights suspended during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. In the US, the FAA says it now receives more than 100 reports of unmanned aircraft sightings a month and that the number is rising despite criminal penalties for breaching secure airspace. Intrusions can create headaches for airport operators. Newark Liberty International Airport closed for 90 minutes in January due to a drone sighting, and London’s Gatwick Airport grounded flights for 36 hours in December 2019 because of a similar incident. Traditional detection systems, such as radar, run into problems when trying to detect small, nimble drones on their own. “They can see a long way, but sometimes they can’t discriminate between a seagull, or a happy birthday balloon and a drone,” said Paul Hicks, head of wireless at Warwick, England-based technology provider Telent Technology Services Ltd. The new detection systems use environmental sensors placed throughout an airport to take in various information points about a particular environment, such as controlled airspace, and use machine learning to quickly determine whether the objects they detect are genuine threats.<br/>