Arcani's HARK portable acoustic drone detection sensor approaching parabolic sound mirrors in Kent, United Kingdom. The sound mirrors were built in World War 2 to 'listen' for incoming Luftwaffe aircraft before radar existed. The HARK sensor is the modern version of the passive detection method used in the parabolic mirrors.
Harry Howe at Arcani Systems Ltd.
Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) have developed palm-sized drones that use bat-inspired ultrasound and AI to navigate through fog, smoke, and other challenging conditions. The device mimics how bats use simple echolocation to navigate dark, cluttered environments with minimal neural processing.
The Ghost Murmur mission report illustrates how real-world operations depend on detecting and interpreting faint, ambiguous signals, aligning with the broader challenge of separating meaningful signals from noisy environments.
But sound has historically been difficult to use in operational environments. Acoustic data is inherently chaotic in real conditions, and isolation is the limiting factor. If sound can be altered, then isolating and interpreting it becomes more complex.
“The hard part is hearing it in the real world, where you have wind, vehicles, generators, surf, birds, echoes from buildings or trees, and often several sound sources at once,” said Harry Howe, CEO and founder of Arcani. “A small drone is rarely the loudest thing in the scene, and its signature changes with speed, aspect angle, throttle, altitude, terrain and weather."
Howe says that means the challenge is less about how a microphone can hear a sound and more about whether the system separates the right sound from everything else early enough to make it useful operationally.
For Arcani, its HARK (Hostile Acoustic Reconnaissance Kit) drone detection sensor can detect, classify and localize drone and ground-based threats in real time. HARK has been exercised in two military Operational Exercises: NATO’s Steadfast Dart 2026 in northern Germany, which tested rapid Allied deployment and Project Vanaheim 2025, a UK-US counter-drone experimentation program in Germany.
“If the acoustic layer is reliable enough, operators do not have to treat every anomaly equally,” said Howe. “They can rank alerts by confidence, cross-check across nodes, and decide whether to escalate, observe or ignore.”
Howe says the shift is not just in detection but in how operators make decisions in real time, which changes the workflow from “investigate everything” to “prioritize what matters.”
HARK listens, deciphers, interprets, and then notifies of an incoming drone threat at the edge within the sensor itself. “We then structure that into a network-level picture: what each node is hearing, how confident it is, whether different nodes are correlating to the same event, and whether the event is stationary, moving, approaching or departing,” said Howe.
Harry Howe, Founder of Arcani holds the HARK with two soldiers NATO’s Operation Steadfast Dart 2026 in northern Germany.
Arcani Systems Ltd
In practice, says Howe, that means they aren’t just collecting audio; they are building a spatial and temporal representation of the environment across the sensor network.
Howe added that this reduces cognitive load and improves time-to-decision, while also enabling power- and bandwidth-intensive systems to be used more efficiently by cueing them with stronger evidence rather than scanning continuously.
“Reliable sound changes acoustics from background context into a practical part of the command-and-control loop,” said Howe.
Combining artificial intelligence (AI) and spatial acoustics are changing what can be extracted from sound, reinforcing the shift toward extracting usable signals from complex, real-world conditions.
Wave Sciences is developing physics-based acoustic AI systems that model how sound moves through real-world environments, using both direct signals and reflections to isolate and track specific sources in three-dimensional space.
“Our physics-based AI software engine picks out the subtle cues buried in direct and reflected sounds to locate the subject in 3D and focus on it,” said J. Keith McElveen, President, founder and research lead at Wave Sciences.
Rather than filtering noise, the Wave Sciences system focuses on where a sound originates and how it moves through space.
“We don’t start by asking, ‘What is the noise?’ We start by asking, ‘Exactly where is the sound coming from, and what is happening to it as it travels through this space?’” McElveen said. “Once we’ve learned that spatial signature, we can effectively refocus the entire recording tightly onto that location … and then blur out everything else.”
McElveen said that sound gives them the advantage since it behaves differently. “It diffracts, it reflects, it wraps around obstacles. So even when you don’t have a clean line of sight, you can still refocus on a target.”
“That shift is not theoretical,” said Bartosz Józefowski, Head of FORT Kraków – Polish DIANA Accelerator and Site Lead. “Acoustic sensing is now a deployable technology.”
“Electronic warfare has changed the rules. RF can be jammed. Visual systems lose effectiveness in cluttered or low-visibility environments where buildings, trees, and weather get in the way. This isn’t just hypothetical - this is happening in live operations today.”
NATO’s Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) uses sensing capabilities that can operate under those constraints, including systems designed to detect threats in environments where traditional signals are degraded or unavailable.
Józefowski says Arcani’s distributed sensing model can be deployed quickly in the field, and Wave Sciences brings the ability to isolate and make sense of the data those sensors collect.
He says they also fit a clear gap. “Traditional air defense systems were not designed for large numbers of low-cost drones, both friend and foe, in a cluttered airspace," said Józefowski. “This is not about replacing existing systems. It is about making them effective against a new class of threat.”
“There is no single sensing technology that works in all conditions. Resilience comes from layering systems that fail differently," said Józefowski. “As those systems evolve, the role of sound is shifting; it moves from being a niche input to becoming a standard layer of situational awareness.”
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