Just as new uses for drones continue to surface (both good and bad), so too do ways to stop them in their tracks. Intended for authorities looking to control sensitive airspace, the DroneBullet from Canadian startup AerialX takes a rather heavy-handed approach, claiming to knock suspicious aircraft clean out of the sky.
Never mind the murky waters surrounding the legality of attacking other people's drones while they fly through the air, anti-drone products are coming thick and fast. The range of handheld anti-drone guns from DroneShield is a notable example, blasting the aircraft with electromagnetic noise at just the right frequency so as to block the radio signals used for control communications, bringing them to ground.
Other, less passive approaches include training birds of prey to quite literally pluck drones out of the sky, capturing them in nets cast from fellow drones and even turning to shotguns. AerialX's DroneBullet is more at home with these latter examples than the former, and though the company doesn't divulge too much about how the technology works as it is apparently in "stealth mode," a video seen below does show the technology in action.
In it, we see an anonymous drone pilot with nefarious intentions load a regular quadcopter up with explosives and set it in motion towards an unknown target.
Little does our protagonist know that waiting somewhere in the wings is AerialX's DroneBullet, a missile-shaped projectile with four propellers of its own, which combine with deep learning and machine vision software to take off and hurtle towards the moving target. A "powerful kinetic strike" follows and the sinister drone falls to the ground, while the intact DroneBullet comes down to land in one piece.
AerialX's technology relies on micro radio detectors to pick out drones as they enter certain sections of airspace, like over an airport or a concert for example, and automatically plot the unknown aircraft on a map. In this way, it bills its product as an appropriate solution for law enforcement or defense forces trying to secure sensitive airspace and keep folks safe.
You can check out the video below.
Source: AerialX
