There are no limits for drones
The Marlboro cigarette pack costs about PLN 4.70 in Kiev (35 hryvnia). In Poland about PLN 16. In Berlin, we will pay 27.14 PLN for it (6.30 euro), but in Glasgow in Scotland as much as PLN 52 (11 pounds). No wonder that when it stopped to be profitable to smuggle alcohol from behind the eastern border of the European Union, smugglers focused their attention on cigarettes. Successful smuggling of cigarettes in a truck from western Ukraine to Italy gives earnings in the order of 500,000 up to 1 million euros, depending on the brand of cigarettes and the costs of the entire operation. It is estimated that the pure profit of the smugglers amounts to approx. EUR 10 billion annually. A better profit can only be obtained for the smuggling of heroin and cocaine. The arms and human dealers are placed just after cigarette smugglers.
Most often, our Border Guard officers detect smuggling on smaller scale in trunks or car tanks. The ingenuity of criminals, however, knows no limits. For three years, i.a., drones have been used to smuggle.
At the beginning of October 2018, officers from the Nadbużański Border Guard Department found a four-rotor drone with a box wrapped in black foil during an unsuccessful smuggling attempt at a distance of about 20 meters from the border Bug.
„The box contained tobacco products without Polish excise marks in the amount of 688 packs of cigarettes of different brands with a market value of approx. PLN 10,000’ – said the Border Guard in its communiqué.Border Guard officers pay attention
to the fact that it is difficult to track drones and even harder to intercept them. Criminals buy increasingly expensive equipment with increased lifting capacity. It is enough that during one night such a drone will make several courses across the border, transferring 50 barges each time, so that the smugglers would be richer by a dozen or so thousand zlotys. The Polish Air Force is helpless in the face of this problem. Shoot rockets to the drone? Send the F-16 to the frontier zone, e.g. in the vicinity of Gołdap? It can bring only problems…
Spartaqs advises
At the lecture closed to the public (the conference had its public and secret part) we demonstrated to Border Guard officers our solutions for combating border crime. As a system for many hours of observation of the border and at the same time a telecommunication mast, we proposed a dronoid OWL Vision.
An integral part of the set is Toyota Hilux, which has a built-in platform for take-offs and landings, and under it the entire power supply and control system for dronoid is mounted. Declared work ceiling is as much as 1000 m, and a flight range of 2500 m in free flight without a power harness. OWL Vision can automatically disconnect the harness and complete the mission.
Representatives of the EU border protection agency FRONTEX really liked the idea of our underwater dronoid Deep Guard. He can perform his missions for many months without having to reveal his position, for example being buried in the sand. Deep Guard can surfaced without the use of engines and ballast mechanism. It transmits the image from beneath the water surface wirelessly in FHD quality. It is ready to cooperate with scuba divers and in a swarm with other dronoids.
The invisible dronoid Prometheus with dispersion coatings, silent and imperceptible to human eye, also aroused great interest among the representatives of the services responsible for border surveillance. It’s the perfect equipment for direct border patrol, for securing actions and preventing smuggling.
Find, target and destroy
However, for the fight against drone smugglers, we recommend our Dronet ADPS anti-drone system. It includes Vector V8 and Vector V4 unmanned aerial vehicles. This system has been designed for one specific purpose: to combat all unmanned objects in the air.
On its board there is a mechanism for launching the net. Eight engines with large propellers are to provide the opportunity to carry most of the drones available on the commercial market, so that the captured drone does not fall without control to the ground. However, when the net does not help, and the situation requires the disposal of the enemy machine at all costs, Vector V8 has four kinetic launchers: two shoot a special shot to destroy propellers, packet and on-board equipment, two more launchers shoot with a bunch of stylon lines emerging from the inside of a specially designed, pressure pipe projectile, which task is to get entangled in the propeller of the ‘hostile UAV’.
All of these mechanisms would be ineffective without the proper pinpointing and targeting mechanism that was used. Vector V8 on board has a classic camera at its disposal, which thanks to appropriate image recognition algorithms supports tracking the object through its visual recognition. In addition, the Vector V8 traces objects in the air through a laser mounted on-board, which continuously scans the area in the immediate distance before the dronoid to capture the object in space.
Regardless of the discussed systems, the Vector V8 may disrupt the operation of the drone and thus stop the enemy object or force it to land. When the blinded drone stops in order to recover communication or waits for a GPS signal, it is attacked by a second machine.
Vector is a basic platform. It has 8 different varieties, including V8M and V4M – antidrone shield, V4SG – observation dronoid with 60x or 120x optical zoom, V4IR with IR 480 mpx 4x zoom camera, V4MS – scouting one with container with IR markers or flares (smoke candles) with optical zoom camera 10x, Vector V4S – Draco – multitasking dronoid with interchangeable modules.
Since the drones of criminals are constantly crossing the border with impunity, it’s time for our system. We’d like to invite you to read this article.
