Teledyne FLIR helps to keep airspace surrounding Swedish critical infrastructure free of drones

As drones are becoming commercially available to a wider audience, effective drone detection and monitoring has become increasingly important, especially for critical infrastructures and sites, such as power plants, utility centers and airports.

However, effective and accurate drone detection is challenging. In contrast to land-based monitoring and detection, aerial detection has a much wider, dome-shaped area to cover, with no real reference points. In addition, today’s drones are fast and small, and they can demonstrate erratic flying behavior. Visual detection systems have an additional challenge, in that they need to detect objects in variable sky and weather conditions.

Drone detection for critical infrastructures

Teledyne FLIR recently provided a robust drone detection system for a Swedish critical infrastructure customer. The project – completed early 2022 – was also made possible by Teledyne FLIR’s longtime distributor and integration partner CCTV-Systems AB, a company which has been in the video surveillance systems business since 1982. Just like Teledyne FLIR, CCTV-Systems AB has vast experience in providing threat detection systems for industrial and security sectors all over the world.

Teledyne FLIR offered an integrated drone detection system based on radar and a combination of thermal and visible sensors. The system uses a so-called slew-to-cue feature, where a radar will continuously scan the sky, detect the drones from a long distance and automatically point the FLIR PTZ camera to the exact position of the detected drone, whereupon the camera will continue to track the moving object using its pan/tilt mechanism.