Potential Threats of UAS Swarms and the Countermeasure’s Need

International audienceThe rising capabilities and growing accessibility of recent Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) widen the risks of success of a terrorists attack through the current aerial defence systems. We will examine first the complexity of the threats from a single unmanned vehicle, to a team of unmanned vehicles and finally to a swarm of unmanned vehicles (and any other association of these three combinations). Then, from an operational point of view, we will see that early detection of danger - a critical stage in the development of counter-attacks - has become very difficult because small unmanned vehicles like UASs precisely possess the ability to take off directly within the sphere of attack. The next stage, equally critical, consists in elaborating the response that best fits the attack. We distinguish three general categories of active and passive countermeasures: destruction, incapacitation and jamming of the enemy UASs. We will then study several possible countermeasures appropriate to the type of attack (enemy’s formation: isolated drone, team, swarm; weapon type: bomb, kamikaze, bacteriological etc.). We first present countermeasures that are rather conventional (they usually come from air defense systems) and others specific to the UAS case. We will finish by a case study in which we will tackle the use of simplified physical models for calculating positions in real time in an optimized way in a UAS swarm under constraints