Drone Hackathon: Minerva

For this hackathon, we were tasked with developing counter-drone solutions that are simple and scalable. While teams focused on taking drones down we focused on detecting them long before they are a problem by leveraging OSINT. Our concept “beers for data” was that we can reward average citizens by taking photos of drone activity and submitting them via SMS, a solution that most of the world has access to. We proved the viability of this idea by sourcing drone photos at the event in exchange for beers, built a computer vision model based on said photos and had a deployable SMS system for drone detection all in under 48 hours. This led to a private meeting with the Chief Warrant Officer of SOCOM but didn’t not lead to a contract.