51 rising threat of intelligent, autonomous systems by hostile actors now that full autonomy can practically be bought by anyone off-the-shelf. Such UAVs can keep flying while their comms are jammed and will still be dangerous until physically detained,” says Robotican CTO Yam Geva. “In the years ahead, attacks from swarms of hostile drones may become intermittent occurrences. How many places in the world are equipped to counter that with a swarm-like number of C-UAS jamming guns with enough personnel trained to use them? A defending swarm or fleet, by contrast, can react autonomously and quickly, and it doesn’t need to be trained beyond the prior development of its AI. As such, we see autonomous C-UAS vehicles such as Goshawk being an important piece of the puzzle to future defence and safety infrastructure.” The Goshawk Robotican’s Goshawk Interceptor is a battery-electric hexacopter, featuring six rotor arms extending widthways and parallel to each other from the 97 cm-long ovular aircraft body. It weighs approximately 21 kg, and flies at an airspeed of 30 m/s (108 kph) for a maximum endurance time of at least 10 minutes between recharges. The system has successfully intercepted 261 hostile drones in a total of 1543 hours of flight. While the airframe is conventional for industrial UAVs, including the use of carbon-composite tubes as rotor arms for their light weight and mechanical stability, the system’s autopilot and flight behaviours have taken inspiration from the natural world – the goshawk bird of prey. “A hawk needs to be able to fly fast, it needs to track and pursue its prey, and it needs to be bigger and stronger than its prey in order to carry it, so we’ve carefully engineered our sensors for its autonomous intelligent vision, and our motors for fast flight and heavy lifting. Capturing trespassing and hostile drones is done by a net because effective talons don’t exist yet, and for other advantages which we’ll explore later,” says Hagai Balshai, CEO of Robotican. The Goshawk Interceptor and its parts have been fully developed in-house at Robotican, as its engineering team and departments cover the gamut of disciplines needed to put a high-speed, high-power autonomous UAV in the field. “From software to electro-optics, gimbals, mechanical hardware and avionics, everything was designed in-house, with just some mass-fabrication solutions like PCBs done by outside suppliers,” Geva says. The Smart Nest Whenever a Goshawk Interceptor is not flying or undergoing repair, it is enclosed inside a base station, designed and manufactured by Robotican, which it calls the Smart Nest. Robotican’s Goshawk counter-UAV | In operation Uncrewed Systems Technology | April/May 2024 As C-UAS jamming solutions will struggle to halt hostile autonomous drones, the Goshawk system is designed to intelligently stop them (Images courtesy of Robotican) The Goshawk is a 21 kg hexacopter. Its flight behaviour for interception missions is inspired by the raptor it was named after
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