Drones are quickly moving from being mainly a military technology to a mass market gadget. The obvious concern is that drones are used for illicit purposes and terrorist attacks. Therefore, MyDefence is pursuing a major market opportunity, developing an innovative drone alarm and protection system – KNOX – able to detect, identify and locate civilian drones, and to jam in a specific wireless frequency range without interfering with other mobile signals. KNOX is to be used by security services providers and infrastructure owners.
The overall objective of the KNOX project was to optimize, fully demonstrate and setup commercialization of the KNOX counter-drone solution by:
• Deploying and testing the KNOX system (Optimization based on end-user output; effectiveness, price, portability, user-friendliness etc.).
• Testing and demonstrating the technical effectiveness of KNOX in real operational environments.
• Developing and defining Standard Operation Procedures.
• Analyzing needed approvals, certifications and establishment of documentation for certification.
• Preparing market entry, organizational capability and project planning.
• Studying the markets continuously and networking to prepare further market expansion.
Conclusion
The EU funded Horizon 2020 project “KNOX” has been a success for MD and the participants within it.
It has provided unprecedented knowledge about state-of-the-art technologies and matched them with the ever-increasing demands for protection against malicious use of drones. Major obstacles were known from the beginning and overcome, like the EU-wide regulations against jamming that proved to be a continuous burden to keep the pace in the project when specifically jamming had to be demonstrated and proven. But it was achieved in several occasions to find collaborative authoritative partners and get the approvals in place to test the technology.
Our competitiveness has been improved, and the KNOX technologies and products have been heavily improved throughout the project to meet the customer needs and create the needed situational awareness about drone activities in these areas.
Today the system is fully active and incorporated into the daily operations in two prisons. There will be continuous improvements to be made to the technologies going forward as the threat continues to evolve into more sophisticated methods of smuggling contraband into prisons, threatening stadium security or harassing air traffic safety in airports.
During the project period in the past 2 years MD have been in contact with several policy makers, public and private security service providers and critical infrastructure owners to gain insight into and align with their security visions and daily operations requirements.
Our KNOX-related efforts have been entrepreneurial in nature and will set new standards as key components in the coming infrastructure of equipment and data.
In summary, through the innovation project KNOX, MyDefence managed to demonstrate the full KNOX concept including the technological and tactical effectiveness. The result became a collection of showcases/use-cases based on the demonstration activities and a finalized full KNOX solution, providing the basis for the sales to security services providers.
