'You can’t hide the sound of an engine' — Inside the revolutionary Czech AI acoustic shield designed to hunt low-flying drones, which could soon come to a street near you

• Neuron Soundware's Sound Shield turns sound into air defense by leveraging AI across already existing technology
• It addresses concerns of the cost and footprint of modern radars by leveraging small, low cost and energy efficient 'edge' units
• The solution itself is passive, making it both, invisible on a battlefield and easy to deploy in civilian areas without causing disruption

The ongoing war in Ukraine and the US-Iran conflict have changed how many perceived modern warfare would go in the future.

Drones are now an increasingly important offensive and defensive deployment, and the asymmetrical warfare they offer is a challenge to counter, given the sheer amount of attack vectors and tactics that are in play for said UAVs.

Now, Czech startup Neuron Soundware thinks it has an answer to what is shaping up to be one of the biggest threats to societies that are otherwise exposed to drone warfare: acoustics.

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Focusing on sound as a means of defense

Modern drones come in all sizes and shapes, making it difficult for radar and air defense systems to both detect some of the smallest and deal with large swarms that have been deadly in current conflicts.

They also offer the ability to disrupt or damage billions of dollars in hardware and infrastructure at a cost that is an order of magnitude lower than that of anything else in a military's arsenal.

Nowhere was this more visible than Ukraine's own sophisticated Operation Spiderweb, which saw Russia lose close to $7 billion in military hardware thanks to surprise attacks by low-cost drones.

Modern radar and air defense are both expensive and imperfect, leading EU leaders to scramble for a feasible alternative. Neuron Soundware, a startup that focuses on AI to listen to industrial hardware, might have a unique but promising solution.

The solution, dubbed Sound Shield, focuses on identifying and locating drones by leveraging microphones attached to small sensors it calls nEdge Minis. All of these would report back to a computing platform powered by Nvidia's Jetson modules, which would, if it detected a threat, inform a centralized platform.

Unlike modern radar, which would require much more expensive deployments and essentially 'announce' itself every time it sweeps, the nEdge minis consume only 1W of power and cost only 100-150 euros a pop, allowing for a silent, power-efficient yet accurate detection tool.

Neuron Soundware is also pitching this as a dual-use system, suggesting it could be deployed near electrical transformer stations to monitor both drones and the electronic hardware at those installations.

"We can deploy our nEdge units in a so-called dual-use mode," said Pavel Konečný, founder and CEO of Neuron Soundware. "Primarily, they can continuously monitor the health of the transformer itself and other critical components of the distribution network - detecting internal discharges, oil leaks, or other operational anomalies."

"At the same time, their microphones listen to the sky. This would reduce the number of nEdge Mini units needed. The state would thus gain a comprehensive air defense network detecting drones with minimal additional installation and power costs."

With modern warfare increasingly becoming asymmetrical and unconventional, potentially effective solutions such as Sound Shield might be the answer to smaller, smarter drones that often come with stealth technologies baked in, simply because of a key limitation they seem unable to address: a noisy engine.

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