FALCON: Why Audio Belongs in the Drone Defense Conversation

The Role of Drones in Modern Warfare

Drone warfare has scaled up dramatically in recent years, with reports of drone strikes increasing over 1000% since 2018. Nowhere is that more visible than in Ukraine - as the Australian Army Research Centre reports: Ukrainian production grew from roughly 5,000 drones annually in 2022 to approximately 4.5 million FPV drones annually by 2025. 

During Certus Innovations’ podcast, The Audio Blind Spot In the Modern Defense Ecosystem, Sinclair Gurny, senior machine learning engineer at Certus Innovations, pointed to the shift in both scale and tactics: "The use of drones in the war in Ukraine is orders of magnitude larger than it's ever been before. Not only are they utilizing … off-the-shelf DJI drones and that sort of thing for more reconnaissance, they're using FPV drones to drop ordinance in certain positions."

That range of drone types translates directly into unpredictability on the ground. As Sinclair explained, "It is a big concern because drones are everywhere. They're very quick... you just see a drone flying, you don't know what it's doing, you don't know what's on it. And that's kind of the scariest part, is not only can there be one drone, there can be 20, there can be 30. They can be automated, and that's even worse."

Closer to home, the risk hasn't yet materialized in the same way, but the team doesn't treat that as reassurance. Ryan Quinn, Director of Software Development, put it plainly: "We have never seen a drone-related terror attack or mass casualty event in the United States, but it could happen any day now."

FALCON: Certus's Audio-Based Approach to Drone Defense

Certus Innovations has been developing FALCON, short for Forward Aerial Layer Countermeasures Operations Network, as its answer to the growing complexity of the drone threat. The name itself reflects the underlying design philosophy. Ryan explained: "Forward as in you don't need a lot of infrastructure to go along with it, and then... Layered Countermeasures, no sensor is going to work 100% of the time in 100% of cases."

That second half, the “layered” part, is the core idea behind FALCON. As Ryan explained during the podcast, “No sensor’s gonna work 100% of the time in 100% of cases.” The goal is not to rely on a single approach to counter every drone threat, but to add another sensing capability to the broader defense picture. Certus’s contribution is audio-based machine learning that can help detect, identify, and localize drones, giving warfighters another way to understand an aerial threat when other detection methods may be limited or unavailable.

Other Ways to Combat Drones

Audio isn't the only tool available for drone detection, and understanding the alternatives helps explain why a layered approach matters in the first place. 

Vision-based detection through EOIR (electro-optical infrared) is one of the more established methods; Ryan described it as a system that "chip[s] out the drone in the sky," though it depends on the drone already being visually distinguishable against its background. Even after a drone is detected, stopping it is its own challenge; Sinclair pointed out that "you can't shoot a fast-moving object like that with your standard firearms," and not everyone carries a shotgun. 

RF jamming is another common countermeasure. RF jamming may not stop every drone, but Ryan argues that even an imperfect countermeasure can change the threat. As he put it, would you rather have an operator “10 miles away with a coffee with his feet up on the desk,” or one connected directly to the drone? Even if the drone gets through, forcing a more exposed operating position changes the risk calculus.

This is where the “layered” philosophy earns its place: no single detection or countermeasure method works in every scenario. Ryan illustrated the idea with an analogy during the podcast to the F-35, calling it “the greatest fighter jet ever created,” while noting that even a handgun shot could theoretically cause enormous damage. The point isn't that one system can handle every threat on its own; it's that different tools have different jobs. As Ryan put it, it’s about having “the right tool in the right job.”

Why Audio Has Gone Ignored, and the Gap FALCON Fills

Despite the range of options above, audio-based detection has historically received far less attention than vision or RF-based approaches; Ryan named the gap directly during the podcast, calling audio "one of the underexplored ways" to detect and identify drones.

Audio's real advantage isn't just detection accuracy, though, it's what it takes off an operator's plate: Ryan frames this as a cognitive load problem, since a person can't visually scan for drones and focus on their primary task at the same time, while passive audio detection can do both. 

There's also a less obvious risk audio addresses, the false confidence created by hearing protection; Sinclair explained that active hearing protection is designed to filter out steady background noise, which means it can unintentionally mask a drone's buzz and leave an operator believing they'd hear a threat they actually wouldn't. 

Audio also holds up in conditions where vision-based systems lose reliability, since sound doesn't change with the time of day the way EOIR's lighting and thermal contrast does, and FALCON is designed around audio's directionality limits using TAK's chest-harness form factor to keep a microphone consistently oriented with the wearer. 

Finally, audio offers something vision-based systems structurally can't: passive sensing. As Sinclair put it, a camera requires someone to actively hold and point it, while a microphone, even tucked in a pocket, is always listening.

Certus Innovations is developing FALCON, or Forward Aerial Layer Countermeasures Operations Network, as a forward, layered approach to drone detection and defense. FALCON uses audio to help detect, identify, and localize drones, giving operators another way to understand and respond to an aerial threat when other detection methods may fall short. 

Learn more about FALCON and Certus’s audio-based ML technology on our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNt4yAvcio