Abstract
While increasingly popular, small unmanned aerial vehicles, aka drones, are often flown illegally over outdoor public gatherings or public facilities like prisons, threatening the safety of those nearby. There is a clear need to address interloping drones in public spaces from a sociotechnical perspective, including understanding the tradespace of variables. Through surveys, interviews, technology and infrastructure design, and experimentation, we developed a tradespace model of those variables that managers and designers of high-risk settings like public spaces and prisons need to consider in their development or renovation. These include cost considerations, both capital and infrastructure, as well as technology design elements of range and false alarm rates potentially exacerbated by convolutional neural networks (aka, deep learning). Results also highlight that environmental design elements can provide a possible low-tech solution in the design of obstructions that either eliminate or complicate a drone pilot’s line of sight. This effort demonstrates that managers and designers of high-risk settings like public spaces and prisons will have to balance sometimes competing objectives to obtain the best possible outcomes for public safety.
Highlights
Small unmanned aerial vehicles, otherwise known as drones or unmanned aerials systems (UAS), are expected to produce a global commercial market value in excess of US$43 billion by 2025 [1]
In addition to the confidence interval which helps users understand the likelihood of an actual threat, if an alert is triggered by the acoustic detection system, users can play back the sound file that caused the alert (Fig. 4b)
With the rise of popularity in small unmanned aerial vehicles, aka drones, managers and designers of high-risk settings like public spaces and prisons are increasingly concerned with unwanted drone activity, which carries risk of harm to the public and supporting staff
Summary
Otherwise known as drones or unmanned aerials systems (UAS), are expected to produce a global commercial market value in excess of US$43 billion by 2025 [1] While this growth brings new economic opportunities, it has opened the door to illegal uses of drones. Given the rise of such issues, it has become critical for managers and designers of high-risk settings like public spaces and prisons to consider how drones could become a problem in such environments Unlike major facilities such as airports with large budgets to develop defensive capabilities, these smaller venues have very limited budgets and staff to dedicate to protection. The bulk of these efforts focus on the use of expensive radio frequency (RF), radar, and electro-optical systems for detection, with one government report listing the cost to be more than $100,000 for 63 % of commercially-available systems
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