JOANNEUM RESEARCH

JOANNEUM RESEARCH Forschungsgesellschaft mbH is an applied-research company headquartered in Graz, Austria, with the Province of Styria as its majority owner. It describes itself as the largest non-university research institution in Styria and works in thematically organised institutes, among them DIGITAL – Institute for Digital Technologies and ROBOTICS in Klagenfurt.

In the drone field the Intelligent Acoustic Solutions research group of the DIGITAL institute works on acoustic drone detection and localisation. Passive hemispherical 3D microphone arrays emit no signals, estimate a drone's position from the time differences between microphone signals and use AI models trained on the acoustic signatures of drone types. The group built this expertise in several projects of the Austrian security and defence research programmes KIRAS and FORTE; stationary sensors and mobile systems for operation on military vehicles are available.

JOANNEUM RESEARCH presented the technology at the DroneVation & Defence symposium in Vienna in September 2025. In the FFG-funded project UAS-CheckPoint (Take Off 2024 programme, launched December 2025) it works with AIT, AIRlabs Austria, Frequentis, Austro Control and others on distributed, energy-autonomous multi-sensor nodes (audio, video, GNSS, Remote ID) to verify drones in U-space airspace.