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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
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Monday February 13 2017, @06:05PM
Quad rotors are rather noisy and their hum, distinctive. While humans might not notice with all the clanging going in a war zone, it shouldn't be too hard for a computer with a microphone doing some low rate signal processing and perhaps a little machine to detect drones by just listening for them. Use two microphones and you get direction too. In principle it should be cheaper than a drone. The only drag would be that, unlike a drone, the detector needs to run all the time, not just for the 15 minutes of an attack. The batteries on an ordinary laptop aren't going to last that long. Specialized hardware can help a great deal but then it is no longer off the shelf cheap.
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Monday February 13 2017, @06:10PM
"machine" => "machine learning". Hit "submit" when I meant "preview"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday February 13 2017, @07:18PM
That aids in the detection problem. What about stopping the drone after detection?
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(Score: 2) by ese002 on Monday February 13 2017, @11:49PM
That aids in the detection problem. What about stopping the drone after detection?
Once you know where the drone is, it is easily dispatched with a shotgun (not sawed off. The drone should be detected long before it reached sawed off shutgun range). Directed jamming works too. You don't really care the what drone is programmed to do with the payload if is stopped before it gets anywhere near the target.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 14 2017, @04:40PM
A shotgun can give away your position. Now a swarm of drones may be invited to come your way.
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