Dronecon Hackathon Overview
What is the Dronecon?
Dronecon is a hackathon planned for some time in 2024. It will involve a mix of physical drone exercises, predictive modeling, spectrum and cyber effects, and more.
A hackathon is a 1-2 week event. Teams make new things. They "hack" together a solution, even when expertise is limited.
Dronecon 2024 hopes to achieve a physical, kinetic, and data hackathon. Innovators will gather to accelerate change, modifying civilian and military equipment, testing them in new ways.
Why a drone hackathon?
Drones are reshaping the battlefield at light speed over the skies of Ukraine and Russia. They are inventing new ways to use them every day out of necessity. We need a similar sense of urgency and the room to test wild and crazy ideas, so that they may be deployed in battle if and when we need them.
We're seeing all kinds of rapid developments and hybrid warfare. There was the mesh net of microphones used to triangulate enemy drones by their whirring blades. On the other side there are fiber-optic spools such that the drone doesn't need any radio connection, in order to prevent interference.
Given the original hobbyist nature of these things and the natural tendency of service members to be tinkerers and inventors, we need to start having our own maker-fests in earnest.
What exactly are we trying to do?
- Extreme divergent thinking, drawing boards, notepads, backs of napkins.
- MAKING things. Take a bunch of components, motors, half-baked drones, single-board computers, radios, emitters, and all manner of related things.
- TEST the things. Fly the creations, test their metal against one another. Try hybrid warfare activities like paintball or capture the flag.
- DEMO real products. Show off capabilities in the open field. Create scenarios in which the technology can battle each other, while actively encouraging outside-the-box battlefield innovations.
- REWARD players, teams, participants with Commander's Cup awards, Peoples' Choice Awards, and the possibility of contracting invitations.
- NETWORK and build an active community of practice in which crazy new drone functions are celebrated.
But how?
- Bridging gaps between the various interested parties and contracting officials.
- Reserving the necessary ground, airspace, frequency bands, and other related pitfalls.
- Collecting feedback from potential participants, stakeholders, product owners, end-users, allies and partners, in order to maximize the event's relevance and efficiency.
Activities
Government Activities
- Autonomy: Building and automating new paths, methods.
- Swarming: Offensive and defensive tactics.
- Cross-agency: Collaborative testing from across DoD and partner agencies.
- Loitering: New first-person views in combat-like scenarios.
- Air-ground coordination: Drone-augmented fire team vs. team.
- Anti-aircraft: Ground-air shoot-down testing.
- Blind ops: Testing zero-camera navigation through other sensors.
- Artificial intelligence: Modeling the automation schools of thought, neural networks, machine learning, deep learning, testing one against the other. Modeling and testing how they might work together in teams.
- Mapping: Translating data from drone to actionable data.
- Electromagnetic signals: Weaponized, deployed from each team.
- Network security: Network sniffing, offensive cyber-from-drone attacks.
- Disaster coordination: First responders, package delivery, area monitoring.
Activities together with Academia, Industry participants
- Data analytics: Forecasting drone behavior, swarms. Accepting unclassified data from DoD end-users to find new insights and efficiencies.
- Rapid prototyping: Creating new theoretical solutions to drone, battlefield problems in the modern era. Opportunity for unfettered creativity.
- Theory-testing: ”Hack” together drone solutions based on said prototypes.
- Education partnership: Crafting DIY drones using single-board computers, radios. Motorized folded paper planes. Scratch origami paper for participants to make folded paper creations while boosting their creativity.
- Volunteer aircraft: Testing industry equipment in hazardous scenarios.
- Psyops: Influence campaigns between teams, leaflet dropping, skywriting.
- Social science: Innovation research, optimizing creativity, personality mixes. Participants opting-in to wearing wrist-bands to track attendee behavior (agent modeling), safety trends and risk acceptance tracking, crowd theory (individual decision-making), and rule-following (normalization of deviance)