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Reuters reports of an experimental drone system tested recently in Germany. Unfortunately there's not a direct link, only this story on the ITNews site:
Basically, a good drone takes down the bad one, as in this excerpt:
"In December, authorities regained control over the Gatwick airfield only after the British army deployed military technology to guard the area. But shooting down drones, or immobilising them with electromagnetic pulses or even jamming them, is impractical at civilian airports given the possibility of inadvertently causing harm to people or aircraft.
Instead, DFS and Rheinmetall, Germany's largest arms maker, have tested a solution that could be highly automated, connecting existing air traffic data with advanced radar systems, acoustic and infrared sensors and optical equipment to first detect possible intruders, and then neutralise them with other drones.
In Wednesday's demonstration, which was hosted by the German military's Technical and Airworthiness Centre for Aircraft (WTD61) about 50 km (35 miles) north of Munich, a "good" drone threw a net over a potentially threatening one, taking it to the ground."
Nets definitely seem the right approach to me. What do you think?
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:17PM (2 children)
You are grossly overestimating the ability of "drones" to compensate for a net type failure. The net falls into/wraps around/jams the props. A good piece of kit can still fly with 1 jammed prop. If you stop several it's going to fall out of the sky.
You can test this at home. Throw some dental floss into a hovering quad, preferably over a soft surface.
I theorize but cannot test that this type of attack would work against helicopters too. e.g. Shooting a line launcher into the rotor disk
(Score: 3, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday February 07 2019, @08:38PM (1 child)
Entirely possible. Interesting stuff.
I think the notion above was that if you can protect the prop surface by encasing it (while still allowing airflow) then the filaments of the net won't touch the props or mast. For quads and I've read that any motor failure is a "land now" event. Hexes and octos can handle a motor loss and still maneuver. Quads might land but it's all done flying except for an absolute expert and even they can get into trouble really fast, though experts can fly them on two. Equipping a drone with motors that can independently hold the craft in flight (you need at least two counter-rotating blades relatively balanced/trimmed for COG) becomes prohibitively expensive awfully quickly.... just like in large scale. Pulling it off balance, though, seems possible.
I wonder how valve packing tape would work for such a scenario. Hyper cool would be some kind of environmentally friendly super-viscous liquid that would just seize up the shafts.
With a real (not RC) helicopter, though, your line would have to be ductile enough to both wrap around and yet maintain integrity, plus wrap up in a way that ends up fouling the control rods (or slipping under the swash and fouling at the mast/transmission junction. Again potentially possible but not too likely - you'd need better than dental floss. RC helicopters, sure I could see that. Delivering it to target is the trick.
The problem with all of these scenarios, though, is one that occurs with trying to stop road traffic: Doing it in a way that is safe to any potential bystanders. Kill a drone, fine. But if it lands on someone.... well I wouldn't want to be underneath a three pound weight dropped from five stories up. Nor would I want to be the officer responsible for having dropped it on that person's head.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Friday February 08 2019, @04:10PM
Agreed. The imaginary solution is a line launcher used for firing a cord between ships. Out of the box the Mossberg 590 with the line launcher kit will fire a 360 lb test Nylon line. I'm skeptical about that being strong enough and feel like some kind of nylon or braided Kevlar being a better option.