National Defense University’s participation in a Defense Challenge event and a separate event it intends to host would deepen the military’s cybersecurity and uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) research to ensure that it can boost national defense by leveraging cutting-edge technology, said Rear Admiral Tsui Yi-fong (崔怡楓), chief of staff at the university’s Chung Cheng Institute of Technology.
The university’s team, led by Colonel Lee Yen-hung (李彥宏), were given an Honorable Mention award at the Defense Challenge, at which participants programed drone simulations to perform autonomous flights to scout multiple targets in an environment where Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is denied, and participants cannot use first-person view, Tsui said yesterday.
The university’s team used dead-reckoning calculations to obtain flight data from accelerometer and gyroscope data, he said, adding that its UAV was outfitted with an Nvidia Jetson Nano board and a global shutter single-lens camera.
Photo: Fang Wei-li, Taipei Times
The drone used a Yolov8 computer vision model, with the visuals processed and optimized by converting the files with Nvidia’s TensorRT, a high-performance deep-learning inference software development kit, he said.
The visual optimizations allowed the team’s drones to identify civilian traffic, camouflaged military vehicles and fuel drums, providing high accuracy and immediate responses with limited computing power, Tsui said.
The Defense Challenge event was hosted by the National Science and Technology Council and National Cheng Kung University, he said, adding that it was not directly related to combat simulations.
This year’s challenge simulated an incident in which drones were unable to link up to GNSS during the major earthquake in Hualien County on April 3 last year, he said.
The military hopes to develop new technologies or software that would allow it to overcome such situations, Tsui said.
Separately, National Defense University is preparing for the Military Academy Cup Cybersecurity Competition on May 22 and 23 featuring teams from its Management College, the Chung Cheng Institute, as well as from the Air Force Institute of Technology, the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy, the Army Academy and Central Police University.
The cybersecurity competition is divided into two parts, the first testing participants’ ability to gather online information, perform reverse engineering, and understand encryption and decryption, as well as their grasp of digital forensics, Tsui said.
In the second part, participants join a “capture the flag” mission, as well as a mission to take over a computer system and achieve specific goals, he said.
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