Brian Wilens

Aerial Drones have been used in defense applications for decades, but recently the commercial use cases of drones have significantly increased to include package delivery, taxis, aerial photography, disaster relief, and even delivery of COVID-19 vaccines. Typically drones rely on a plurality of in-flight sensors for navigation and external command and control signals for tasking. As drones continue to proliferate our skies, the need to secure communication between drone constellations will become increasingly important, since the unmanned nature of drones offers new attack vectors which are not present for platforms with human operators. Quantum security protocols such as Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) offer unique advantages over classical approaches to secure the command-and-control signals of current and future drone constellations. In this presentation, we will report progress towards demonstrating QKD between two drones in flight. Critical subsystems and characterization data will be presented such as the QKD source, which is based on a resonant cavity Light Emitting Diodes (LED), as well as a secondary QKD source based on a fiber-coupled polarization modulator. The Pointing Acquisition, and Tracking (PAT) system provides both course alignment using Infrared (IR) beacons and cameras and fine alignment is achieved using Fast Steering Mirrors (FSM) and feedback position sensors. We will discuss QKD optical payloads, which were fabricated using a 3D printed bench to achieve a compact size and weight, single-photon detectors, an FPGA-based time-tagger and two time-synchronization approaches. Providing quantum security to emerging drone networks, including airborne and ground-based systems such as self-driving cars, is a critical enabling technology required to extend the future quantum internet to mobile platforms, with could play an essential role, e.g., for reconfigurable distributed quantum sensors.