Epirus arms drone with microwave emitter to shoot down other drones
The military is looking for various ways to destroy enemy drone swarms, from hacking and jamming to lasers mounted on ships and trucks. Directed microwave energy has become a promising option, but conventional microwave weapons are bulky, making them hard to carry, and they are not as precise as needed in an environment with both friendly and hostile drones.
Startup Epirus introduced a powerful microwave system that can be deployed on an unmanned aircraft. According to the company, the Leonidas Pod is a ground system designed to protect forward operating bases from incoming threats, and it can be installed on many other systems.
Leonidas Pod is based on the company's other ground-based microwave weapon, which uses gallium nitride transistors to generate microwaves instead of the bulky magnetron vacuum tubes the military has used in radars for decades. Gallium nitride microwave radar technology emerged as a research area around 2004, but until recently it had not been applied to counter-drone technology.
Epirus CEO Lee Madden said that this shift from magnetron tubes to solid-state transistors allows a stable microwave beam to be maintained with less power and in a much smaller container, small enough to fit on the underside of a heavy drone.
According to him, the new system has another advantage that current ones lack: because control is software-based, the operator can better distinguish friend from foe.
“We can receive sensor data from blue force trackers in the armed forces or IFF transponders on aircraft, we can effectively place a protective sphere around that friendly system, and wherever that system goes, the sphere follows it. This is made possible by the software-defined capability of the system”
The system is designed to counter drone swarms rather than individual drone threats. These swarms are a growing problem for the US armed forces as they develop counter-unmanned aircraft capabilities.
"The newly introduced Leonidas Pod provides a range of mission capabilities and, thanks to several mounting options for maximum portability, can move directly into the threat environment. With Leonidas deployed alongside a drone-mounted Leonidas Pod, the systems work in unison to achieve greater power and range, and to create a multilayered force field," Epirus said in a statement.
Leonidas is meant to be a cost-effective solution for countering electronic threats compared with using expensive kinetic weapons to take down cheap drones. The company said Leonidas can quickly fire at targets with an "almost instantaneous effect" without overheating, and the system eliminates the need for reloading.
The system can be switched on and off within minutes and has an extended battery life, allowing the Leonidas Pod to move to a threat in any domain and then return to base. The module has a standby mode, and the system can be activated without draining the battery.
The company presented its ground version of the system in 2020. During three field demonstrations in 2021, the system showed it could counter both helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles, and in the latest demonstration it disabled an outboard boat engine, proving possible maritime applications.
Epirus recently won a multimillion-dollar contract from the US Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop software for more accurately predicting the behavior of electromagnetic waves.
Last month, Epirus became one of four companies selected for the Army Application Laboratory Soldier Power Cohort program to develop intelligent power management solutions.
The company also works with larger defense contractors. In October 2021, Epirus announced a partnership with General Dynamics Land Systems to integrate Leonidas into vehicles such as the Stryker combat vehicle and other manned and unmanned ground vehicles, to provide short-range air defense (SHORAD) capabilities.
The Army recently sent its first platoon of Stryker-based SHORAD systems to Europe. The service is also building four 50-kilowatt Stryker directed-energy SHORADs. Epirus was founded in 2018, entering the growing $2 billion counter-drone market.
Lee Madden, who heads the company, was previously CEO of Microsoft's national security division before joining Epirus. CFO Ken Bedingfield was previously CFO of Northrop Grumman. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper sits on the company's board of directors.
The counter-drone market is so crowded that the Pentagon has established the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, tasked with identifying reliable systems and rapidly deploying new technologies to address the problem.
