COURAGEOUS

As Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) or drones become more and more available, law enforcement agencies find themselves confronted with the novel task of having to police the access to the lower airspace. Commercial providers have already developed a wide range of solutions to this extent, but the capabilities of these systems are hard to benchmark. The result is that end-users have a hard time in matching the right tools to the specific use cases that they encounter.

In order to remedy this situation, the COURAGEOUS project will develop a standardized test methodology for detection, tracking and identification systems. This standardized test methodology will be based upon a series of standard user-defined scenarios representing a wide set of use cases (e.g. prison & airport security, critical infrastructure protection, border security, drugs & human trafficking, etc). For these scenarios, operational needs & functional performance requirements will be extracted by the COURAGEOUS end-users. Using this information, an integral test methodology will be developed that allows for a fair qualitative and quantitative comparison between different counter-UAS systems. This test methodology will be validated during three user-scripted validation trials.

European Commission

Internal Security Fund

2021 – 2024

3,3 M€

Project Publications

2024

  • A. Borghgraef, M. Vandewal, and G. De Cubber, “COURAGEOUS: test methods for counter-UAS systems," in In Proceedings SPIE Sensors + Imaging, 2024.
    [BibTeX] [Download PDF]
    @inproceedings{spie_alex,
    title={COURAGEOUS: test methods for counter-UAS systems},
    author={Borghgraef, Alexander and Vandewal, Marijke and De Cubber, Geert},
    year={2024},
    booktitle={In Proceedings SPIE Sensors + Imaging},
    publisher = {SPIE},
    location = {Edinburgh, United Kingdom},
    unit= {meca-ras, ciss},
    project= {COURAGEOUS},
    url={https://spie.org/spie-sensors-imaging/presentation/COURAGEOUS-Test-Methods-for-Counter-UAS-Systems/13199-13#_=_},
    }

2023

  • G. De Cubber, P. Petsioti, R. Roman, A. Mohamoud, I. Maza, and C. Church, “The COURAGEOUS project efforts towards standardized test methods for assessing the performance of counter-drone solutions," in In Proceedings 11th biennial Symposium on Non-Lethal Weapons, 2023, p. 44.
    [BibTeX] [Download PDF]
    @inproceedings{decubbercuas2023,
    title={The COURAGEOUS project efforts towards standardized test methods for assessing the performance of counter-drone solutions},
    author={De Cubber, Geert and Petsioti, Petsioti and Roman, Razvan and Mohamoud, Ali and Maza, Ivan and Church, Christopher},
    booktitle={In Proceedings 11th biennial Symposium on Non-Lethal Weapons},
    publisher = {European Working Group on Non-Lethal Weapons},
    year = {2023},
    location = {Brussels, Belgium},
    unit= {meca-ras},
    url={https://mecatron.rma.ac.be/pub/2024/Towards%20standardized%20test%20methods%20for%20assessing%20the%20performance%20of%20counter-drone%20solutions.pdf},
    pages={44},
    project= {COURAGEOUS}
    }

2022

  • T. Halleux, T. Nguyen, C. Hamesse, G. De Cubber, and B. Janssens, “Visual Drone Detection and Tracking for Autonomous Operation from Maritime Vessel," in Proceedings of TC17-ISMCR2022 – A Topical Event of Technical Committee on Measurement and Control of Robotics (TC17), International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO), Theme: “Robotics and Virtual Tools for a New Era", 2022.
    [BibTeX] [Download PDF] [DOI]
    @INPROCEEDINGS{ismcr2022_1,
    author={Halleux, Timothy and Nguyen, Tien-Thanh and Hamesse, Charles and De Cubber, Geert and Janssens, Bart},
    booktitle={Proceedings of TC17-ISMCR2022 - A Topical Event of Technical Committee on Measurement and Control of Robotics (TC17), International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO), Theme: "Robotics and Virtual Tools for a New Era"},
    title={Visual Drone Detection and Tracking for Autonomous Operation from Maritime Vessel},
    year={2022},
    volume={},
    number={},
    url={https://mecatron.rma.ac.be/pub/2022/ISMCR-Drone_detection_tracking_FullPaper.pdf},
    project={MarLand, COURAGEOUS},
    publisher={IMEKO},
    address={},
    doi={10.5281/zenodo.7074445},
    month={September},
    unit= {meca-ras}
    }