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posted by martyb on Monday February 13 2017, @01:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the drones-with-shotguns dept.

This year, the world saw a long-theorized weapon in action: a commercial drone, like a person might find at Best Buy, dropping a bomb on a target in Iraq. These drone bombers, used by the ultra-violent quasi-state ISIS in Iraq and Syria, are the flashiest combination of modern technologies with the modern battlefield. Cheap, camera-carrying robots, put to nefarious ends by a group that could never otherwise dream of fielding an air force. Dropping grenades isn't the deadliest thing an insurgent group can do with a small flying robot, but it leads to a very important question: What, exactly, is the answer to such a drone?

[...] Here is just a short sample of the more out-there anti-drone tools: net guns, drones carrying nets, squads of drones with nets, drones with net guns, and a smart anti-drone bazooka that fires, you guessed it, a net at a drone (we liked that last one). There was a vaporware drone concept that ensnared the propellers of other drones with wire. A Russian firm floated the concept of a microwave gun, to fry the electronics of hostile drones. And most famously, there are the Dutch police eagles, trained to snag a drone from the sky.

Part of the problem for law enforcement, the Pentagon, and other entities trying to protect against drones is that they're cheap. Workable quadcopters cost as little as a couple hundred dollars. Is there a way to knock drones out of the sky that's just as cheap as the drone itself?

Source

http://www.popsci.com/how-to-stop-a-drone


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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Monday February 13 2017, @02:27PM

    by looorg (578) on Monday February 13 2017, @02:27PM (#466593)

    I'm really surprised this wasn't one of the listed options. Instead all of these "net" ideas of trying to snare the drones somehow. There is a reason you shot small birds with shotguns, same applies to small drones. Hitting is great but hard but if you use a shotgun they don't need to take the full blast to fall out of the sky. That said if they carry bombs (or grenades) you might not want them to just fall out of the sky anywhere - which is I guess where the whole net and trap idea would shine, but they are really only good then if you trap it and can drag it away - not entangle it so it falls out of the sky anyway. Then that would be just as uncontrollable decent wise as the shotgun blast.

    A shotgun can technically knock a drone out of the sky, provided the drone is within range and the person firing the shotgun is ready for the legal consequences that come with discharging a firearm at a robot.

    Provided the drone is in range? Compared to the "net" solutions that don't require that? Right. A shortened shotgun (or sawed off -- which technically probably isn't legal) can shot almost whatever scrap you can find and it would devastate an unarmored drone at close range and bringing it down. I was also under the impression here that it was the military and LEO that was the drone hunters. Not that all citizens should walk around with 12gauges and shooting at anything that flies by. Legal issues resolved. You could also make adjustments to the shotgun blast as far as range and lethally goes but then the price will go up as you won't be using off the shelf components anymore.

    If you are using a jammer, such as the DroneDefender mentioned in the article, will the drone just crash or will it stop and land in a controlled manner? Which might be just as dangerous then either way.

    Since range is an issue you could also just make some kind of kamikaze-drone that smacks into the other drone. Possibly with a minor explosive device of it's own. Fighting bombs with other little bombs.

    But still the main issue remains. How do you detect and track a small mostly plastic object flying around. None of the ideas seem to tackle that issue.

    If the main problem is that they are to cheap I guess they could just institute a drone-tax which would make the price skyrocket instead. Still it would require a fairly large tax if you want to make drone-bombs less appealing then car- or truckbombs or just any kind of roadside IED.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Monday February 13 2017, @02:45PM

    by Arik (4543) on Monday February 13 2017, @02:45PM (#466602) Journal
    "I'm really surprised this wasn't one of the listed options."

    You and I are thinking of it as a technical problem to solve, while those who are actually working on this for money are viewing the problem as 'how to get paid lots of tax money' so simple and inexpensive is not what they are going for.

    "Hitting is great but hard but if you use a shotgun they don't need to take the full blast to fall out of the sky."

    Yep. Some experimentation would be good to determine range and best loads but I'm thinking number 8 birdshot might be ideal for a quadcopter or similar target. You only need to damage 1 critical component, there are several, and they're not armored.

    Some of the stuff being cooked up in Syria may be slightly more challenging, but from what I've read not much, they're working with stuff on the same scale and of course armor on any sort of airplane is a big problem since weight is so important.

    "A shortened shotgun (or sawed off -- which technically probably isn't legal) can shot almost whatever scrap you can find and it would devastate an unarmored drone at close range and bringing it down."

    A short barreled shotgun cant fire 'whatever scrap you find' at least not without a lot of work processing that scrap into ammunition. You're thinking of a blunderbuss? A modern sawed-off shotgun is going to take normal shotgun shells as ammunition. They just scatter the shot much more quickly. Devastating at extremely short range but nearly useless beyond that. Doubt you would be shooting at drones so close this would be a good idea.

    "If you are using a jammer, such as the DroneDefender mentioned in the article, will the drone just crash or will it stop and land in a controlled manner? Which might be just as dangerous then either way."

    It would be a neat trick to simply hijack control, and far from impossible (the Iranians pulled it off with a US drone a few years ago,) but a bit tricky. Just jamming it should be much easier and less error prone, but yes there is a problem. With a normal quadcopter, when the control is jammed, they will descend and halt for safety (at least the one I saw do this did, and it's my understanding this is standard practice - for safety.) So that would be nice BUT there's no guarantee these are 'normal' devices with intact safeties. The guys making them can probably program whatever behavior they want to kick in when jammed, so that might be bad.

    "Since range is an issue you could also just make some kind of kamikaze-drone that smacks into the other drone. Possibly with a minor explosive device of it's own. Fighting bombs with other little bombs."

    That could work but it doesn't seem like the easiest path. Might be a profitable one though, obviously every time one of these things blows up that's a new sale, and the little defensive drone could easily wind up costing 1000 times as much as the threat that it stops.

    "If the main problem is that they are to cheap I guess they could just institute a drone-tax which would make the price skyrocket instead. "

    I'm sure the jihadis building these things in underground workshops in Syria will just quit work immediately when they realize they can't pay the taxes on them. What?

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 13 2017, @02:47PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 13 2017, @02:47PM (#466603)

    How do you detect and track a small mostly plastic object flying around.

    Having built a little sub-250g one myself I can assure you that the non military community puts zero effort into RFI suppression.

    Probably a good place to start before building little mini HARM missiles would be sniff for completely unshielded 3-phase brushless motors running 1000+ RPM. Electrically noisy as all hell. When you detect one sound an alarm. Use DF loops and with enough sensors reporting strength and alignment a very small perl script should be able to plot the location pretty quickly.

    There is an almost too obvious solution, if they can launch one drone on you, go MAD strategy and give each squad a cloud of military grade drones. So you have better 360 degree coverage at a further range than the attackers. I hope you like that whining sound of drones because I suspect the battlefield in 2020s is going to sound like a leaf blower sales convention.

    Lets see if every M1A1 had a row of autonomous fast chargers and auto battery pack swappers 1500 HP of gas turbine could electrically keep quite a fleet of our drones in the air. So if every window has one of our drones looking in it, how do you propose the opfor will attack us?

    If you want to get the conspiracy theory people going just tell them crappy teen FPS games are drone training. You only live a couple minutes before respawning, you stay low alt because if you see it you can kill it and all the high value stuff is on the ground anyway... Given an infinite supply of bandwidth to the fighting area... Remember we have a lot of people predicted to lose their jobs due to automation, and they're all fat and old and high. We have enough quality cannon fodder to staff army divisions but now each 4 man tank requires say 160 drone pilots back home, that gives you four shifts for 24x7 coverage and ten active drones per tank which frankly might be low and you need maybe 20 drones for military effectiveness and lets say 40 battery packs and a 20 pack multi-battery charger... Its not entirely insane of an idea.

    I've gone to a couple outdoor drone racing events and given a small target and competitive testosterone its not unusual for drones to hit each other, so have half the drone force for a tank (five) flying CAP near the tank and the other half (five) doing recon missions in areas where it would be convenient to view and attack a tank. That forces the opfor into positions where its not easy to see what the tank is doing, which may very well be the whole point of the exercise. Sure Mr Opfor our drones will mercilessly hassle you when you're in the five best places to ambush their tank, so you go to the sixth best place where the infantry carefully set up a textbook perfect killbox ambush for you and then ...

    • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday February 13 2017, @04:36PM

      by DECbot (832) on Monday February 13 2017, @04:36PM (#466644) Journal

      I like your thinking. I order to reduce the cost of operation, we can make the drones semi autonomous. Then you can have dozens of drones controlled by a master "manager" that will keep observation of all the drones, ensure the drones are patrolling the correct locations, schedule charging, alert ground forces when the drones spot something on their sensors, and ensure that all the TPS reports are submitted with the correct cover letter of the week.

      If the reports aren't necessary, then even the manager's job could be automated.

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 13 2017, @05:03PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 13 2017, @05:03PM (#466656)

        From a combat perspective suddenly having tank commanders going from three people and a radio yelling at them to an extra ten pilots high on energy drinks back home is likely to be a problem, so I like the idea of a flight controller talking exclusively to the tank commander.

        Something I like about grognard hex based military sims/games is I can bolt something like this on to MBT (a great cardboard game, not computer game) and just try it out. So the alternative rules of simulation is zero fog of war in all adjacent hexes because of CAP, zero ambush situations, plus you can warp the arty game mechanic into tasking a drone recon force to any hex in sight. It would seem to unbalance the game so much as to make it unplayable, which I guess makes it a good or inevitable weapons system.

        Culturally things would get weird if tank crews go from mostly being tankers to mostly being drone combat pilots teleoperated from back home. I wonder if drone combat pilots would have to be enlisted and put up with the green weenie or be the usual civilian contractor types. Hmm.

        There's probably a decent hard sci fi or military sci fi book buried in here somewheres. Really I have no idea why I do this computer shit when I should probably be writing sci fi novels. In my infinite spare time, I guess.

    • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday February 13 2017, @11:00PM

      by hemocyanin (186) on Monday February 13 2017, @11:00PM (#466773) Journal

      So what you are saying, some dude with a $200 drone can invoke a $5,000,000 counteroffensive. Sounds like the $200 guy wins no matter what here.

    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday February 14 2017, @01:07AM

      by mhajicek (51) on Tuesday February 14 2017, @01:07AM (#466803)

      The drones will be fully autonomous, and a flock was just launched from a Super Hornet for testing recently.

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