Iris — drone detection at the edge
RF + RTL-SDR + small ML on a Pi at the perimeter, alerting when a consumer drone shows up — no cloud round-trip.
Off-the-shelf drone detection is either £20k+ for a single sensor or relies on the manufacturer's own remote-ID broadcast (which jammers/grey-market drones don't carry).
RTL-SDR sweeps known consumer-drone control bands, a small classifier identifies modulation patterns matching DJI/Autel/Skydio families. Pi + WireGuard back to the operations console gives sub-second alerting. Lives entirely on the customer's network.
Spectral classification: is this RF signature consistent with a known drone control protocol?
Defined the alert criteria, integration with the venue's existing security workflow, and the call-the-police runbook.
Caught real drones at real events. False-positive rate manageable after one site-specific calibration day.
Generic model trained on broad RF data was useless on the local noise floor. Per-site recalibration baseline is non-negotiable.
Hybrid sensing > any single modality. Now combining RF with audio and computer-vision confirmation for high-stakes deployments.
- 01If your problem has expensive incumbents, the entry-price they leave on the table is your wedge.
- 02AI works best as the cheap broad sweep, with a human (or a second sensor) confirming.
- 03Edge deployment isn't just a privacy story — it's a latency and reliability story.