In a shielded lab at the University of Alberta, researchers in Ashwin Iyer's electrical and computer engineering lab successfully jammed the GPS of a high-tech drone.
The drone was placed inside an anechoic chamber, a room designed to absorb sound and electromagnetic waves. When the team checked the drone's navigational terminal outside the chamber, it pinpointed its location as the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris — more than 7,000 kilometres from where it actually was — with 99.9 per cent certainty.
"My mind just starts running with how much we could be doing in there to test drones in situations where there is no GPS," says Jamie Fitzpatrick, a former Canadian Special Operations officer and now business development lead at Lockheed Martin, where he oversees small unmanned aerial systems.
"We're a business, and we specialize in the speed at which we innovate. Sometimes that means we build something first; that's our mindset. But our relationship with the U of A allows our engineers to better understand the vulnerabilities of these systems. Then we can take that knowledge, extrapolate it and do the magic that we do best," he says.
