Inside DARPA's Hackfest at NASA Research Park

A recent, five-day DARPA Hackfest attracted a mix of civilian coders, DARPA program staff, security manufacture professionals in suits, and military personnel sporting fatigues. They all gathered at NASA Research Park in Moffett Field, CA to come up up with innovative concepts for drones equipped with Software Defined Radios.

As Dr. Linda Doyle, Professor of Engineering science and The Arts at Trinity College Dublin, told us at the issue, software defined radio (SDR) automatically detects available spectrum and switches frequencies when needed, which will become increasingly important every bit more than and more IoT devices come online. At DARPA, the bureau is looking for smart drone solutions for conflict zones, which could help address concerns well-nigh the Usa Armed services' use of the applied science.

DARPA Hackfest 2022 At Moffett Field, Hackfest participants carried drones to the "Range" (Hangar 45), a nearby flight exam expanse. Posted signs warned participants not to transmit outside NASA-approved frequencies, and information technology appeared that anybody complied (nothing was shot out of the sky past a Battelle DroneDefender).

The Hackfest'southward marching orders? Come up upwards with innovative concepts for SDR-equipped drones that: extend range from base station to multiple drones while fugitive interference; enable dynamic handoff betwixt ground and air and vice versa; and integrate sensors to provide real-time data during flight.

8 teams were cleared for the result, including participants from Aerospace Corporation; a partnership between the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Southern California known as DeepEdge; Fat Cat Fab Lab, a makerspace in New York City; and Assured Information Security, which staffs the Adversarial Sciences Laboratory, the Air Forcefulness Inquiry Laboratory's cyber operations unit of measurement.

It wasn't strictly a competition—no trophies—only a manner for DARPA to appoint with the free and open up source software community and spot rise stars. Afterwards all, DARPA'southward nigh $3 billion 2022 budget provides for 100 plan managers overseeing approximately 250 research projects, generally contracted out to third parties.

One of these program managers is Dr. Tom Rondeau with DARPA's Microsystems Engineering Part (MTO). He joined DARPA in May 2022 from GNU Radio, where he was the lead developer and maintainer, and his inquiry interests include adaptive and reconfigurable radios, improving the development bike for new point-processing techniques, and creating general purpose electromagnetic systems.

"I've been involved in the open source community for many years," Dr. Rondeau told PCMag. "When I was at GNU Radio, we held hackfests like this several times a twelvemonth, to keep the community energized and engaged in our work. You lot solve problems for days with too picayune slumber, and besides much caffeine, a completely unsustainable way of working, but with short bursts of energy y'all can get so much done.

"For this DARPA SDR Hackfest, my squad put software radios onto remotely piloted aircraft and we fabricated this model system available to the Hackfest teams, who, we hope, will develop exciting new opportunities to build better and more than complex cyber-concrete systems."

Dr. Rondeau'south team fabricated the following available to team members: two types of loftier-form solo quadcopter UAVs (with photographic camera and gyroscope) and controllers—the 3DR Solo with Pixhawk-2 Controller OR TurboAce Matrix-Due south; ArduPilot autopilot software with Software Radio Peripherals; Ettus USRP B210 transceiver; and Linux-based workstations, such as HP's ZBook Mobile Workstation running Ubuntu xvi.04.2 LTS with Intel Dual Band Wireless Air conditioning 8265 and GNU Radio installed using PyBOMBS or installation method of choice.

It was time to watch some of the teams do pre-flight checks. With prophylactic glasses on, and difficult hats for those within the controlled area, we watched the DeepEdge team accept its SDR-enabled drone through a test.

Most of the squad stayed in front of the mesh boundary to operate the ground command base station. Then there were geek chortles as 1 of the students walked into the flight space with a blown up photograph of Khan (Starfleet references went down well at the DARPA SDR Hackfest, as one might expect). As the drone went up into mid-air, it became clear that Khan was the adversarial target. The UAV locked on and got fix to load and attack (only with no weapons on board, just looked battle-prepare).

Dr. Marco Levorato, Banana Professor in the Donald Bren Schoolhouse of Information and Figurer Sciences, at UC-Irvine, took a moment out of supervising the DeepEdge squad to explain what their drone was doing.

"We brought two faculty and two students from each academy to approach the mission," said Dr. Levorato. "We're using video input to observe and attack a visual target. The drone is now locking on and centering on the target and we're now moving control to ground station from the drone. We're doing this as part of the mission to dynamically avoid interference depending on what's happening during the flight. We have some logic to protect control—including temporal and frequency recognition to reach this."

Later on scheduled test flights, the teams returned to demarcated hacker spaces to prep for the final flying-off that Friday afternoon. Dr. Rondeau and his squad moved between the areas, offering guidance or a new perspective, sitting downward with participants to piece of work through bugs and problems.

"From the military perspective, the electromagnetic battlespace is one of the biggest threat spaces to the time to come," Dr. Rondeau pointed out. "And we, in the US, have to be amend at using it, because we have to exist controlling it to maintain our competitive advantage. Here at the DARPA SDR Hackfest today, we're surfacing talent, ideas, concepts that aren't rooted in the past ways of doing things. Nosotros have an internal term at DARPA—'non-traditional performers'—this means smart individuals and teams who tin perform at a level that events like today challenge them to exercise, that'south who we're looking for today."

If you fancy yourself every bit a non-traditional performer, and desire to dig into the SDR-related code yourself, the DARPA team fabricated information technology available on GitHub. If you desire to dispense your own UAV and tackle the missions DARPA set up at the Hackfest, there's an installation guide, too. But call up to bank check your tethering and make sure yous're not using protected spectrum or it could go dangerous out there. We'll keep yous posted on the next DARPA Hackfest coming up in 2022.