In an antidrone technology competition earlier this year, Boeing showcased a futuristic laser weapon that can punch a hole straight through a hostile aerial threat. The multinational—and several other defense giants—lost to four college students who knocked drones out of the sky using sound waves.
The rookies’ device was developed in a parent’s backyard using an old car speaker.
The students’ success in the technology competition, hosted by the Canadian military, highlights a shifting dynamic in one part of the defense industry. While giant companies have long dominated the weapons business, the advent of drone warfare is giving minnows more of a chance to compete.
Drones used in Ukraine and the Middle East, for example, are often made cheaply with off-the-shelf components by smaller companies or even individuals. Huge demand is prompting governments to cast a wider net for new equipment.
In Ukraine, there are more than 200, mainly small, drone makers. The U.S. and its allies want to foster more companies that develop drones, and ways to defend against them.
The four University of Toronto engineering students spent around $17,000 of their own money to develop their antidrone technology. Their speakerlike device blasts ultrasound waves that destabilize a drone’s navigation systems, sending them off course or crashing to the ground.
Now comes the hard part. The newbies want to turn their prototype into battlefield-ready equipment. They need to raise funds, refine their technology and turn initial interest into orders.
“We are building from scratch, we had no reference whatsoever,”
said Anna Poletaeva, one of the students.
The project began over a cup of tea. Poletaeva, who was studying material sciences, and Parth Mahendru, an aerospace-engineering student, were discussing the competition but knew they couldn’t afford to build a weapon that fired missiles or bullets. They decided instead to target the components inside drones.
All materials have a so-called resonant frequency—the point at which they vibrate most when hit by sound waves—and Poletaeva reasoned this could be used to destabilize drones midair. It is akin to the science class demonstration of shattering a wine glass with sound.
The pair enlisted Asad Ishaq, a robotics student, who unscrewed two “tweeter” speakers from his car. Tweeters produce higher-pitch sounds, which the team blasted at drone components in Mahendru’s living room. An electrical engineer, Michael Acquaviva, joined to build the device’s circuitry.
Early findings persuaded the group to buy more-expensive speakers capable of hitting frequencies beyond those picked up by the human ear, which they tested in Ishaq’s parents’ backyard.
The group named their startup Prandtl Dynamics, after Ludwig Prandtl, the German aerospace pioneer.
When Mahendru found out that Prandtl had been invited to compete at the competition, he saw the email addresses of the other competitors, including Boeing, the Italian defense giant Leonardo, and Teledyne, the U.S. industrial conglomerate.
“That kind of scared us,” said Mahendru, who now serves as Prandtl’s chief executive. “We realized that this was not just a student project anymore.”
From Student Project to Company
At the competition, held at a military base in southern Alberta in June, the mismatch was clear. Rival teams drove large SUVs and turned up to breakfast wearing company-branded clothing.
Nevertheless, Prandtl’s system knocked one drone out of the sky and sent others veering off direction. The students placed second out of 15 entries alongside another four-person startup. The winner was a laser weapon from AIM Defence, a small Australian company.
Mahendru had arrived in Alberta with almost $9,000 in credit-card debt from funding the project. His company left with the equivalent of more than $270,000 in prize money.
Prandtl is now seeking new premises, investors and clients. The move from student project to fully fledged company remains an amateur endeavor. Acquaviva sought advice from a corporate lawyer who lived on his parents’ street, while Ishaq turned to a family friend for help with pitch books.
Small companies aren’t new to defense. Some 60,000 businesses work in the defense industry, according to the National Defense Industrial Association, a trade body. But most supply components to the big companies that typically win government contracts.
New equipment tends to be made by larger companies because development costs are prohibitively high. The U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin spent $3.2 billion on research and development last year.
The emergence of low-cost drones in war is starting to bring smaller organizations into the high-profile field, according to companies and defense experts.
Billions of dollars have flowed into the defense-tech industry in recent years, and a host of venture-backed players are starting to make inroads. Those include Anduril, the startup founded by a former Facebook executive. Smaller drone companies, including Teal, from Utah, and Huntsville, Ala.-based PDW have recently won military contracts.
At a recent conference in Ukraine, more than a hundred investors descended on Kyiv to hear dozens of small drone and electronic-warfare companies pitch their products.
Funding for earlier-stage companies, though, is often hard to come by. Globally, only two seed-capital investments, worth a total of $14.2 million, were made in defense startups last year, according to the data provider PitchBook. The federal government has spent billions in recent years on technology from top national-security startups, but most U.S. defense spending continues to go to traditional military contractors.
‘A Bit Daunting’
Prandtl still has to work on the technology. Canadian Army officials have indicated that they could be interested, Acquaviva said, if the company can increase the range at which it stops drones to at least 100 meters, up from 50 meters.
That might not be easy. Using sound waves to destabilize a drone at greater distances is harder because they dissipate on hitting the air, said Gregory Falco, a professor at Cornell University and an expert in aerospace security.
“They will need a lot more sound,”
or figure out how to better direct the waves to the target, Falco said.
Poletaeva said the company is confident in getting past 100 meters but that surpassing 150 meters will be tricky. There are various ways to amplify sound waves, including using magnets and lenses, she added.
Another challenge for Prandtl is that drone makers are constantly coming up with new ways to guard against countermeasures. For instance, foam could be added to drones to block sound waves, a measure against which the company is already testing its tech.
Overall, Prandtl’s technology could be ready to deploy within the next two years.
“It’s exciting for sure, sometimes a bit daunting,” said Poletaeva.
Source: MSN