A drone detector a soldier can carry on the move. Working prototype, field-tested outdoors.
Kotwal is a working prototype built and field-tested by one engineer, on commonly available open-source hardware and libraries. Detection runs on the camera itself, so the computer beside it does almost no work. That is what keeps the unit light and low-power enough to carry.
It has been tested outdoors in daylight on private farmland, over about 15 sessions in three months, against three drones of different sizes.
How the prototype got here, in five stages in 2026. Every box and tag in these clips was drawn by the device.
Stage 1 · 2026
The camera points at open sky above a row of apartment towers. The detector runs on the camera itself, and a laptop watches its live preview over remote desktop.
Watch for the yellow tag. It appears when the camera finds the drone, a dark speck against the clouds.
Stage 2 · 2026
Indoors, the camera is aimed at a laptop screen full of drone photos. It is a quick way to see which drones the model picks up, across many shapes and backgrounds, without flying anything.
The model at this point was YOLOv8n, trained for 43 epochs, with training scores of mAP50 0.91, precision 0.93 and recall 0.84.
Stage 3 · 2026
The unit now saves its own footage, detection boxes included. A quadcopter flies above the trees and stays boxed against a clear sky.
Detection runs on the camera itself, so the Edge computer beside it does almost no work.
Stage 3 · A known limit
Against a bright, hazy sky the drone stays in view, but the box comes and goes. Detection here is intermittent.
The model was trained mainly on an open-source dataset. A dataset of our own, shot in conditions like these, is the next step.
Stage 4 · 2026
Out in an open field, the drone is held near the camera and moved through the frame to check detection up close.
The box follows it from the grass up to the skyline.
Stage 5 · 2026
Over farmland, the camera tracks an Agribot A6, an 8-rotor agricultural drone about 1.5 m across, as it flies against cloud and distant hills.
Against this drone, in daylight, Kotwal has detected out to about 100 m.
Live preview, viewed over remote desktop
The same detect-and-alert unit is useful wherever a drone should not be: farmland, solar plants, prisons, event venues. Today Kotwal only detects and alerts. It does not interfere with the drone.
Avaran Defence is raising early funding and is open to incubation. Founded by Devansh.