Unmanned aerial vehicles today are commercially available in a wide range of applications and in a variety of price and weight classes equipped with basic functionality such as waypoint navigation or programmable digital outputs. Consequently, all necessary functionalities for potential attacks are available. Malicious actors can easily use UAVs for criminal purposes. Thus, these devices constitute a high risk for critical infrastructures.

From the perspective of security, for maintenance of essential goods and services in Austria, a continuous adaptation of the defense system to these new kinds of threats is crucial. AIT Austrian Institute of Technology therefore has put an early emphasis on Counter-UAV-Research overcoming the limitations of ground-level perimeter protection and classical surveillance technologies.