Counter-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Solutions Face Complex Environment

The threat landscape for small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is evolving at a fast pace, so companies providing anti-drone capabilities must move swiftly.

State-of-the-art systems rely on a combination of radio frequency (RF), radar, optics and acoustic systems to detect small drones.

For its counter-drone technologies, Motorola has been integrating an advanced camera system into systems for the United States Air Forces in Europe, enabling the military to “see” smaller drones further away, explained Johnathan Grim, pre-sales engineer, Motorola Solutions.

“We provided an optical piece of the detection layer scheme with high-performance cameras,” Grim said. “So, they’ll have more robust tracking and capture capabilities.”

Motorola’s camera system, as part of its counter-UAV Silent Sentinel system, relies on various-sized lenses that engage depending on which target operators want to see, the location and distance. They use 1,200-millimeter (mm) lenses, although 1,000 mm and 785 mm lenses are more typical. On the infrared side, the lens size goes all the way up to 1,600 mm. “This capability matches common radar systems,” Grim said.

The camera system moves quickly at 200 degrees a second. “Even your smallest UAVs, we are seeing it from distances of 4 kilometers or greater, depending on atmospherics,” he noted.

The company’s purchase of Los Angeles-based Silvus Technologies in August 2025 adds mesh network radio and ultra-wide radio frequency (RF) detection capabilities layered onto Silent Sentinel. The result is a dual-radio signal cell phone device that works in contested environments.

These capabilities work well in contested environments, have high data output and use cellular LTE connections. Their solutions also work with ATAK capabilities, the government Android Team Awareness Kit, a geospatial infrastructure and military situation awareness application that works with Android-based smartphones. Layering in LTE-related anti-drone capabilities can pick UAVs out of LTE bands, Grim said.

Their solution also is a full-spectrum RF sensing capability that does not rely on a library. Usual RF detection technologies are based on libraries of systems tuned to detect known signals.

“When you are trying to get through jamming, you are trying to go low signature, and it works very well, because you can set the radios out, and they will talk radio-to-radio, rather than one big signal trying to get to a place,” Grim clarified. “And they can have a very high data pass-through radio, sending video directly from the Silent Sentinel camera into an ATAK system, or other systems. ... And with the LTE CRFS system [a Motorola subsidiary], we can actually pick those UAVs out of the LTE bands based on altitude movement, and then if you have one of the several cameras available, you can slew over and say, ‘Is that a drone? What is that?’ You have got ways to confirm or deny what your detections are.”

Meanwhile, NexTech Solutions has focused on rapid deployment of the industry’s leading technologies, relying on modular, buildable systems that are vendor-agnostic and “deep operator integration” that provides rapid feedback, said Glenn Larish, senior program manager, NexTech Solutions.

“Over the last year, we assisted a customer facing a resource-constrained environment of manpower and funding to do capability assessments of what was actually in the market and then bring that to them for demonstrations and integration efforts,” noted Larish, a retired 20-year Air Force Research Laboratory engineer, who worked primarily on counter-UAS system development. The company then focused on rapidly fielding the capabilities after taking the steps necessary to embed with operators.

“It is not enough just to field the system and get it out there, because in all honesty, we have seen it in Ukraine and in other places, that the tactics of the enemy change drastically and very quickly,” he stressed “What you set a system up to do on one occasion may not be what you need for the next occasion. Something is going to change.”

Larish emphasized that the government should pursue counter-unmanned aerial vehicle technologies that are vendor-agnostic. “All too often we see these large acquisitions of equipment that have become very monolithic and unable to actually iterate,” he stated.

Instead, speed of delivery can be accomplished by the crawl, walk, run perspective—identifying the biggest threats, rolling out a countermeasure quickly, even if it is only an 80-85% solution.

“And more importantly, as we field stuff now, are we giving you the building blocks to build on that, or are you going to need to do a wipe and replace of new technology in three years?” Larish said.

Walaris is a computer vision and sensor fusion software company with offices in Germany, Croatia and the United States, shared David Sonntag, senior director of Business Development, Walaris GmbH. The company identified a capability gap for the German Army—a lack of rapid, deployable, easy-to-use, mobile counter-UAS systems.

“Most systems are very big and complex and need a lot of training to operate it,” he said. “So, we developed a rapid deployment kit, which is lightweight, is plug-and-play, and easy to use.”

Walaris’ kit can simultaneously track 40 objects, using AI and a multisensor package.

The goal was to have one soldier be able to carry, set up and operate the solution within 10 minutes, Sonntag noted. “Ten minutes, one soldier with limited training in order to make it run, and then it should run autonomously with minimal interaction of the soldier,” he stated.