Future commercial application of ORKAN algorithm

31. 01. 2024. / Project
ORKAN - Zadnji eksperiment Prelog
The research team of the project "ORKAN – Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Policy Ecosystem", among which there are 13 researchers from Croatia, most of them from the University of Zagreb Faculty of Organization and Informatics (UNIZG FOI) and an external associate from Iceland, is the first team in Croatia that managed to find an algorithmic solution to manage a large number of drones from one place, which also have their own mission - in this case, to locate the pilot of a potentially intruder drone.

The last experiment by the research team was conducted in Donje Međimurje, during which they managed to lift into the air a constellation of drones enriched with measuring devices designed precisely at UNIZG FOI, which can collect signals from the environment and measure their strength, which indicates the location of the intruder drone pilot. It is a very complex algorithm that the whole team worked on, and one of the most important contributions is controlling the constellation of drones and locating a pilot intruder drone, which until now was almost impossible and not a single research team in this area has succeeded in the feat.

This kind of algorithm can have a wide commercial application - Professor Vrček explains and adds that it can be used to measure noise and environmental pollution in urban areas, but also to measure radio signals and all forms of unwanted radio emissions that may appear in a certain territory. In the world, the application of this technology is wide, from the construction sector to military use, due to the relatively cheap and fast ways of collecting various data on these types of commercial aircraft. This was primarily for us a scientific project, but commercialization is also possible among all those who deal with some kind of environmental monitoring - says Prof. Vrček.

During all the experiments of this research team, a large amount of data was collected for analysis, which will be used to further improve the algorithm for localization of the control signal source. A new application solution for managing a constellation of drones and technologies for locating the pilot of an intruder drone is the main result of the ORKAN project, which from the very beginning was aimed at creating a new architecture for the communication of networked systems, including drones and the Internet of Things, with an emphasis on simplicity, security and energy efficiency communication.

The project “ORKAN” (IP-2019-04-4864) is funded by the Croatian Science Foundation in the amount of 71,000.00 EUR, with a duration of 48 months, from 01/02/2020 to 31/01/2024. The purpose of the project was to develop a research platform consisting of a control center expandable by user applications and a constellation of drones. The project leader is Prof. Neven Vrček, Ph.D. from UNIZG FOI, and from the very beginning of implementation a team of 15 researchers from UNIZG FOI, industry experts and external expert from the University of Iceland, Prof. Karl Gudmundsson, Ph.D. participated in the project.

More about the project is available on the official project website.

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